Name: Yann Novak
Nationality: American
Occupation: Interdisciplinary artist, composer, label founder at Dragon's Eye Recordings.
Current release: Yann Novak's new full-length The Voice Of Theseus is scheduled for release on Room40 July 7th 2023. First single "Super Coherent Light" is out now.

If you enjoyed this Yann Novak interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official website. He is also on Facebook, Instagram, bandcamp, and Soundcloud.  



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it?

As a teenager I was a big music lover. Growing up queer in a small midwestern town meant I gravitated toward underground scenes because they offered safer and more accepting environments.

I was exposed to a lot of different genres: Punk, Goth, Ska, etc. But nothing really fit until I discovered the rave scene. Electronic music, in all its different forms, offered what felt like a glimpse of the future. For a sci-fi nerd that was always daydreaming of a better future where my identity might be accepted, electronic music and rave culture felt like a utopia.

I think this is fairly specific to my age—Disco died in 1979 in the US with the highly racist and homophobic Disco Demolition Night. That was the year I was born and it happened just a few hours south from where I grew up. So until discovering the rave scene, I had very little exposure to electronic music. As I got older, I continued to gravitate toward the fringe. So as electronic music got more popular and more codified in the late 90s, I started to get interested in the upcoming genres like Illbient, Microsound, lowercase, etc.

I can’t really pinpoint an experience or moment. It was more of a logical progression where the focus of the genres I was listening to became more about the character of the sound, and how those sounds were created.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using sound in an unusual or remarkable way captured your imagination in the beginning?

For me it was seeing the installation Theater of Memory by Bill Viola at the contemporary art museum in my hometown in 1998-ish.



The piece consists of an uprooted tree sitting on its side in a darkened room with a projection on one wall, lanterns hanging from the branches, and a recording of what I remember as bells. It was not the rhythm or timbre of the bells that stood out to me, but their contribution to the overall sensory experience, how they complimented and enhanced every other element of the piece.

As an artist, I think one of my fascinations with sound has always been the context it’s presented in. How does the addition of my sound to a concert hall for a performance reshape that space? How does the addition of an installation of mine shape a gallery or museum space? Does it make it more welcoming? Less welcoming? Can a security guard tolerate listening to it for their 8-hour shift? When you finish listening to an album of mine do you want to restart it? What were you doing while you listened?

These types of questions, and my fascination with sound as an inescapable element of experience, all reach back to that installation I saw 25 years ago.

What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?

I think upbringing and cultural surrounding have a huge influence on our artistic lives. Earlier, I mentioned growing up queer in a small midwestern town and Disco Demolition Night—both are parts of American culture that shaped me in inescapable ways. On my album Slowly Dismantling, I explore both of these things to some extent.



The album explores how dominant culture can shape small town gay culture, how that can lead to weird queers like me feeling excluded, and how as an artist that made it hard for me to incorporate my queerness into my artistic practice.

That album was a huge breakthrough for me in terms of finally integrating my whole life experience into my work. I think the things I was leaving out were still shaping my practice. But letting them shape it openly gave me a lot more agency over what I was making.

Working predominantly with field recordings and sound can be an incisive step / transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

It absolutely was. Early in my career I gravitated towards field recording because it offered an external guide for the concept, composition, and timbre of my work. This was driven both by the fact that I was insecure about the defendability of my decisions, as well as my insecurity around showing too much of myself for fear the work would not be relatable. In my installation work I used altered photography in a similar way. I was insecure about my partial color-blindness and felt like using photography relieved me from any accountability around color choices in the work.

Recently, I have actually let all that go. I have started working with pure synthesis and pure colors I choose; I only use field recordings as triggers when I feel my work needs something naturally chaotic. It has been extremely rewarding to make sounds from scratch, simply because I can relate to them, without worrying about defendability or relatability. It also does not limit me to making work about the subjects and locations I have access to, because I don’t have a lot of opportunities to travel collecting new sounds.

I think the transition has been really beneficial for my work, and I also have a lot more fun making it!

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and working with sound? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?

Lately, I have been allowing my perceptual differences to shape my artistic practice. My partial color-blindness, dyslexia, and tinnitus have all led to what I call perceptual insecurity—an uncertainty of how accurately I discern the world around me. Working with sound and light allow me to explore these differences and to create opportunities for audiences to understand my differences, or explore their own.

I don’t see myself as part of a tradition or historic lineage. Every time I try to fit myself somewhere it makes me feel like the odd man out. If I had to choose, I would probably fall somewhere between the lineage of ambient electronic music and the Light and Space movement, but I am uncomfortable with both.

I feel like a big part of the historic lineage of ambient music is allowing the work to be experienced as background music, or as Eno put it, “a tint.” But as a queer artist, this often feels a lot like being asked to not take up space, and I am done with anything that asks me to take up less space.

Similarly, the Light and Space movement is so removed from the artists’ identity, or even gestures, that it also starts to feel suffocating. The Light and Space movement was all about exploring the act of looking, and I am more interested in creating spaces that focus our gaze on each other and how we all experience the same things in different ways.

What are the sounds that you find yourself most drawn to?  Are there sounds you reject – if so, for what reasons?

I used to be drawn primarily to drone-y sounds and quiet sounds, but in late 2015 I developed tinnitus and my musical and sound preferences changed drastically.

In order to cope, I went in search of music that would help mask the ringing. Droning sounds or white noise, which help most people, only offered a bed for the ringing in my ears to rest on. Conversely, I found that music with beats, rhythm, or even music that just has a lot of transients totally helped me. All those interruptions and the complexity stopped me from focusing on the ringing.

As my musical taste veered in that direction, my work has followed. I think my EP Finding a Way to Live was the first time I introduced my take on transient sound. I have continued to explore and refine those interests in all my work that has followed.

Now, on my upcoming album The Voice of Theseus, I have gone farther and started to incorporate beats and rhythm, which has been a really exciting development that I look forward to exploring more.

As creative goals and technical abilities change, so does the need for different tools of expression, from instruments via software tools and recording equipment. Can you describe this path for you personally starting from your first studio/first instruments and equipment? What motivated some of the choices you made in terms of instruments/tools/equipment over the years?

My first studio was just a laptop, a field recorder, and lots of free software for manipulating the field recordings I collected. As I have left field recordings behind and started to focus on synthesis, I have purchased a few synthesizers, but I have stuck with hardware instead of software.

One thing I wanted to carry over from field recording was the delay that exists between collection, audition, and composition. If something goes wrong during a recording, you can’t just go back and redo it, and you may not even find out until you have completely left that location. Soft synths took that out of the equation; they didn’t present any reason not to have multiple instances that were always pliable, always editable and, to me, felt unfinished.

With my hardware synths, I often use the same one for multiple parts on a single track, so I am forced to create a patch and record it, then create a new patch and record it, etc. It forces me to commit to things and then work around those decisions, just like the field recordings did.

For my new record The Voice of Theseus, I incorporated beats which was a new process for me. Because it was so new, I wanted to use sounds I was familiar with, so I got a Roland TR-08. It offered the types of sounds I wanted, in a form that I was familiar with, and had a connection to my raving past.

Because I was so happy with the beats on the new album and had so much fun making them, my partner Robert Takahashi Crouch and I rewired our shared studio so I can use his Vermona DRM1 drum synth. Now I am looking forward to incorporating new types of beats with even more customizability into my next project.

The possibilities of modern production tools have allowed artists to realize ever more refined or extreme sounds. Is there a sound you would personally like to create but haven't been able to yet?

Definitely. I think most of the sounds I make are attempts to create sounds that I have previously not heard before, but the success rate varies from sound to sound.

On The Voice of Theseus, I used vocal samples from two of my favorite vocalists, Dorian Wood and G. Brenner as the basis for a lot of sounds. I had very lofty aspirations for how I would manipulate these samples and what I would turn them into. I would say 25% of those ideas actually worked out, and the other 75% of the vocals on the album were discovered in the process of trying and failing at something else.

Failure is so integrated into my practice that one of the tracks on the album is titled "The Inevitability of Failure".  

How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

I think sound and space are intrinsically linked because sound is a vibration that needs a space to vibrate in, even if that space is the distance between your earbud and eardrum. Because I see the relationship between sound and space as a kind of constant, it’s reliable to me. So I try to create similar types of listening spaces regardless of the presentation method.

Composition, on the other hand, plays a very different role depending on the type of work I am presenting. In my performances and in my recorded work, I pay close attention to composition, both at a micro- and macro-level. Because both of these mediums are durational, they offer the opportunity to really play with the character of sound and the audience’s experience of sound over time, to create a really dynamic and diverse experience. I love a really subtle crescendo!

With my installation work I have no control over how long the audience will sit with the piece, so I try to take composition out of the equation entirely. Instead, I try to create an almost static experience. The longer the audience sits with the work, the more complexity will be revealed, but that is a product of sustained listening, not a compositional element within the work.

I want the work to reward patience, but I also don’t want the casual audience member that can only stay for a few minutes to feel as though they have missed something. I want every visit to feel rewarding, no matter the duration.

We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

I think it’s all about context and intention. I live in an urban area where leaving our window open comes with the equal chance of letting in bird sounds or a pop song blaring from an idle car. Our downstairs neighbors have a porch right below our window, and when our windows are open they have equal chances of hearing bird sounds or a pop song coming from our place.

If I allow myself to, I can enjoy whatever is drifting in the window and I hope our neighbors can do the same. That said, when it’s hot enough to have our widows open at night and the birds start chirping at 5 a.m. there is absolutely nothing enjoyable or musical about them!

So, no matter what your intent might be, context also matters.