Yann Novak - The Voice of Theseus '2023

Tracks list

In a radical re-approach to his musical output, Yann Novak devises his most
dynamic sonic offering to date. The Voice of Theseus, expands his mode of
operation, inviting in key contributions from vocalists Dorian Wood and
G.Brenner, both of whom contribute to the core compositional elements of the
record. Starting at voice as a point of departure, The Voice of Theseus traces
sensation and sense making as a primary means to understanding the reality we
find ourselves within, a reality that is fraught by, and forged by, our own
physiological and psychological ways of being. This record significantly expands
Novak’s oeuvre and in doing so opens an entirely new chapter in his
practice.

A note 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 original parts, at what point could the ship no longer be
considered the same entity?

In recent years, I’ve become interested in exploring the perceptual
differences I experience. While some of these differences—partial color
blindness and dyslexia—have been with me my entire life, tinnitus caused
by hearing damage is a relatively new change to how I experience the world. It
is these sensory challenges which have shaped my artistic practice by creating
what I call a perceptual insecurity—an uncertainty of how accurately I
discern the world around me. 

The Voice of Theseus is my attempt to explore the obstacles I face in processing
external sensory information. If I have trouble perceiving reds and greens, if I
have trouble hearing certain frequencies, if I don’t interpret written
language in a standard way, how closely can I experience reality in the way that
others experience it? The album asks the listener to question how their unique
means of perception and interpretation might differ from that of others.

For The Voice of Theseus, I asked two of my favorite vocalists to assist with
this experiment. Both Dorian Wood and G.Brenner recorded vocals for me to
manipulate throughout the album. If their original audio is Theseus’s
ship, the changes I make to their voices are like the Athenians replacing each
of the original vessel’s pieces. And so, how far can these vocals be
pushed while still remaining attached to the vocalists’ identities? Where
lies the separation between the source materials and the objects they’re
used to create?

The myth of Theseus’ ship allowed me to tease at the nuances of how
reality can be observed, interpreted, and altered in an indeterminate number of
ways; it can be dismantled and rebuilt, many times over. And yet, because of my
internal circumstances, a perceptual insecurity remains. As flexible as the true
nature of an object or moment may be, inaccuracy looms. There’s no real
way to know how great the disparity is between my observational experiences and
another’s, and no clear limit of how many pieces of our shared reality
can be altered—before it stops being just that.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Yann Novak - A Monument to Oblivion (2:50)
1.02 - Yann Novak - Reflex Point (1:16)
1.03 - Yann Novak - Traversing the Substrate (5:20)
1.04 - Yann Novak - Interlude - The Translator (1:25)
1.05 - Yann Novak - Super Coherent Light (8:44)
1.06 - Yann Novak - Patterned Behavior (4:41)
1.07 - Yann Novak - The Inevitability of Failure (6:12)
1.08 - Yann Novak - Seeing Light Without Knowing Darkness (8:42)
1.09 - Yann Novak - We Went out, Not with a Whimper, but a Whisper… (5:03)

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