Touch Announces the Release

Of Multidisciplinary Artist Yann Novak’s New Album

The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past

LOS ANGELES, CA – December 12, 2017 – 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 quadriptych – a single gesture broken into four parts – that meditates on the inevitable progression of time, our relationship to the past, and our distortion of the past through the imperfections of memory. The album will be released February 23, 2018 on the London-based label Touch. Available digitally and on CD, the physical version will be packaged in a gatefold sleeve as a limited edition of 500. For more information on the artist and release, please visit www.touch33.net.

The album’s conceptual roots stem from The Archaic Revival by American ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna. In it, McKenna theorizes that when a culture becomes dysfunctional it attempts to revert back to a saner moment in its own history. He suggested that abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, and rave culture were proof of this default to a more primal time. The text’s idealism was influential to Novak in the ‘90s, but today the theory bears a darkly-veiled resemblance to the rise of nostalgia-driven nationalism. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the signifiers of a ‘better time’ – McKenna’s idea highlights our propensity for selective memory, seeing history through the lens of memory instead of fact. On The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past Novak looked back at his own older works through this lens as inspiration.

Double Exposure 2017, Photo by Tyler Hubby.

“For this album I was interested in expanding into a more emotive compositional style and palette. In doing so, I was reminded that this was territory I had covered early on in my career — the whole process became a way to reconnect with my own past and history.”

The album’s four tracks dynamically shift and surge, where time is rendered as material and momentum compels it into movement. Subtle distortion throughout the album ties the tracks together and echoes techniques explored in Novak’s Meadowsweet (Dragon’s Eye, 2006). Tension gives way to a halcyon vision of place in “Radical Transparency,” immediately followed by the austere swells of “The Inertia of Time,” a piece that captures the twin impulse of generating optimistic beauty in harshly muted tones. Both tracks introduce subtle bass swells and stabs reminiscent of In Residence(Dragon’s Eye, 2008). From there, the album grows darker with “Casting Ourselves Back into the Past,” and “Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment,” two icier tracks that preserve the album’s core: a layer of something long since passed that locks us into the very moment we inhabit. The latter introduces a processed vocal sample of Geneva Skeen, similar to Novak’s collaborative work with Marc Manning on Pairings (Dragon’s Eye, 2007). The album is a study in perception and alteration, manipulation and awareness, effectively capturing Novak’s command of emotional texturing.

About Yann Novak –

Yann Novak is an artist, composer, and curator based in Los Angeles. His work is guided by his interests in perception, context, movement, and the felt presence of direct experience. Through the use of sound and light, Novak explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on our present location in space and time. Novak’s diverse body of works – audiovisual installations, performances, architectural interventions, sound diffusions, recording, and prints – ask participants to reclaim the present moment as a political act.

Novak’s work has been experienced through exhibitions and performance at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; The Broad, Los Angeles; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Mutek Festival, Montreal; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Soundfjord, London; Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and The Stone, New York, among others. His recorded sound works have been published by Crónica, Porto; Dronarivm, Moscow; Farmacia901, Berlin; Hibernate, Leeds; Home Normal, London; LINE Imprint, Los Angeles; Tigerbeat6, Los Angeles; and Touch, London, among others.

As a curator, Novak focuses on creating opportunities for artists and audiences to build communities that otherwise might not exist. This began in 2005 when he re-launched his father’s imprint Dragon’s Eye Recordings with a new focus on limited edition releases by emerging and mid-career sound artists, composers, and producers. Since its re-launch, Dragon’s Eye Recordings has published over 70 editions and has received critical acclaim internationally. In 2013, Novak became a member of VOLUME, a curatorial collective dedicated to presenting time-based work by emerging and established artists engaged in sound-based practices through performances, concerts, exhibitions, screenings, workshops, and publications.

Novak has participated in numerous artists residencies including the The Jental Artist Residency, Sharidan, Wyoming; The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles; The Taliesin Artist Residency, Spring Green, Wisconsin; and The Touch Mentorship Programme, London, among others – yannnovak.com.

About Touch – 

Since its first release in 1982, Touch has created audio-visual productions that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time – touch33.net.

About the Release – 

Artist:
Yann Novak

Title:
The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past

Label:
Touch

Track Listing:

1. Radical Transparency [10:00] 

2. The Inertia of Time [09:19]

3. Casting Ourselves Back into the Past [10:19]

4. Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment [11:20]

Release Date:

February 23, 2018

Catalog No.:

TO:105

Duration: 

41:28

Format:

CD, Edition of 500 / Digital

Liner Notes:

P&C 2018 Touch. 

• Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd. 

• Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft. 

• Mastered by Lawrence English at 158.

• Made in the E.U.

All tracks composed and recorded by Yann Novak in Los Angeles, U.S.A., 2017.

Vocal sample on “Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment” by Geneva Skeen.