CD – Touch

We have already mentioned the artist, composer and researcher Yann Novak, who in the past released works with different labels such as Murmur, Hibernate, Estuary, his Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Infrequency, Line and Farmacia901. Now it’s the turn of Touch for his new interesting album. The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is a project focused on the relationships between memory, time and the context of the compositions. The American ethno-botanist, philosopher and psychologist Terence McKenna, a very significant personality in the long wave of the international psychedelic movement, claims that “when a culture become dysfunctional, it tries to return to a healthier moment of its own history”. Yann Novak seems to be very impressed by this statement, that actually was the theoretical picklock of the neo-primitivism in the nineties and of the movements to return to a presumed age of innocence. There has never been an age of innocence in the history of mankind and all the social-cultural forms are somehow dysfunctional. But among the cuts we don’t perceive any special form of nostalgia. The almost silent progressions, the limited twitters and the thin harmonies, in the first of the four tracks, in our opinion can’t simply lead to a conformist and dull retour a l’ordre. In the primitive state today naively recalled, fifty, sixty, one hundred years ago, there was no space for these experimentations, despite that in our perceptual time machine anything can be turned upside down and undergo large or small mutations resulting from any epochal gate passage, no matter if this change is under the form of a direct experience or is mediated by some theoretical approach. What we can’t ignore of this work is the care for the details, the refinement and the coherence of the audio micro-emergencies, the balance between the parts and the hypnotic continuity of the sound captures, their harmonies and their disturbances. The unavoidable progression of time, our relationship with the past and our personal distortion of what had happened due to our memory’s imperfections, create new realities, the future, a different syntony which finally seems to have a new mind space to progress and spread out.

 

Yann Novak – The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past