Music has long served as a space where emotions can be expressed and explored without the pressure of resolution.
For listeners and composers alike, it offers a rare place to contend with grief, anxiety, or despair without requiring those feelings to go anywhere or even mean anything in particular.
Meadowsweet (redux) is a case in point – a 20th anniversary remaster and rerelease of Yann Novak’s 2006 album Meadowsweet. A tribute to a family member who had just passed, the album represents both Novak’s struggle with the silence that rushes in when someone is gone, and how he chose to live in that emptiness rather than flee it.
Meadowsweet was recorded in a single take, glitches and all, as a musical representation…
Tag Archive: Yann Novak
This off-label release by Dragon’s Eye Recordings label head Yann Novak explores various notions of misinformation in the form of three tracks of experimental ambient music, each about 10 minutes long.
The source material consists of slightly more than two dozen field recording and synthesizer loops that Novak arranges and manipulates into something other than their original forms.
The pieces blend into one another in content and tone. Heavy bass elements combine with ominously lilting chords. There are slow progressions across windswept soundscapes, as well as subtly vibrating bass drones and sparse percussion. But these offerings are far from minimal and instead provide layers of detail like stratified…