Yann Novak
The Voice of Theseus
From Yann Novak In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos’ minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any orig…
Giving Water To The Dead
*In process of stocking.* The four tracks that comprise "Giving Water to the Dead" were composed using sound materials originally recorded for the sound installation Histories of the Present, a public artwork commissioned by the City of Berkeley in 2019. But where the installation was about a melding of practices and sounds into a single gesture, Crouch and Novak wanted to take the opportunity of a split release to exploring divergent paths starting from common ground. For "Giving Water to the D…
Lifeblood of Light and Rapture
** Monochromatic print, matte laminate jacket with emboss, insert card ** Room40 presents Lifeblood of Light and Rapture by Yann Novak. "When I began working on Lifeblood of Light and Rapture I was thinking a lot about both my personal and society’s tendencies towards nihilism. When I was in grade school, I was taught that 2020 would be the turning point in our collective fight against climate change—that if we did not change by then, there would be no turning back. After learning this at a youn…
Stillness
Edition of 200. American interdisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak returns to 901 Editions with his 4th edition for the label following ‘Blue.Hour' (2013), ‘Undefined' (with Richard Chartier, 2013), and ‘Liminality' (with Fabio Perletta, 2014). His new venture takes the form of a book and CD documenting the history of his series of works ‘Stillness' (2010–2017) through essays, photographs, and an audio CD. Stillness takes its inspiration from the two climates Novak has inhabited: Subtropi…
The Future is a Forward Escape into the Past
The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is the latest album by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak, and his second for Touch. It considers the relationships between memory, time, and context through four vibrantly constructed tracks that push Novak's work in a new direction while simultaneously exploring his sonic past. The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is composed as a sonata -- a single gesture broken into four parts -- that meditates on the…
Ornamentation
Yann Novak is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Ornamentation is Novak's first physical release on Touch and continues his investigations of presence, stillness and mindfulness through the construction of immersive spaces, both literal and figurative. On Ornamentation, Novak resists modernism's problematic relationship to race, class and labor, and attempts to decouple contemporary minimalist sound work from this historical precedent. The title refers to Adolf Loos's notoriou…
Paradise & Winchester
Paradise & Winchester was created in late 2011 for the Belgian imprint Unfathomless who's credo is to commission works that 'illustrate artists personal fascination for specific locations, either natural, human built, or fictitious'. In response to this, Novak chose a location that he had never been to, yet knew he would have a strong reaction to, Las Vegas, NV. The piece focuses on 'The Las Vegas Strip', a portion of Las Vegas Boulevard outside the city limits spanning two unincorporated townsh…
Undefined
Undefined is the first collaboration between artists Richard Chartier and Yann Novak. For this piece the artists chose to collaborate in a way that was less about concept and more about the act of listening. The piece began with Chartier creating an unfinished work and sending it to Novak with no explanation, just the instructions to add to it, subtract from it, or a combination in order to finish the piece. Novak was then to send the recording back to Chartier for a simple approval or rejection…
Blue.Hour
Yann Novak Blue.Hour explores the high contrast colors created in the landscape during “l’heure bleue,” the period of twilight each evening when there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. Directly following the ‘Golden Hour,’ know for its diffused yet powerful light, the Blue Hour retains the diffusion but lacks the strong light source giving this period of the day an especially melancholic and meditative atmosphere. Blue.Hour is presented here in stereo with some compositional elemen…
Relocation.Reconstruction
Relocation.Reconstruction is derived from the sound elements of the three installations in Yann Novak’s solo exhibition Relocation at Lawrimore Project (May 2009). In the original exhibition, Novak explored the multitude of emotional states experienced during and after the relocation of one’s life. With this latest work, Novak continues his exploration into this theme a year after the initial event that inspired him, with the new insight that although he has arrived at his destination, the reloc…