Tiny Mix Tapes gives Red Rainbows 4 out of 5 stars! Link to the full review here.
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Noveller is the recording project of Sarah Lipstate. Lipstate, who
has created music with One Umbrella, Parts & Labor, Sands, Cold
Cave, Rhys Chatham, and Glenn Branca, is also a photographer and
filmmaker. Not only the titles, but the sounds on her two albums
released by No Fun Productions this year, Paint On The Shadows and Red Rainbows,
exemplify the visual dimension that Lipstate introduces into her aural
explorations and sound ontologies. The colors and textures Lipstate
produces with looped guitar phrases bloom and swirl to generate a
robust, moving visual landscape that coincides with her collage-film
technique and dream-world photographic manipulations.
Lipstate’s music is similar to the emerging movement of experimental
artists such as Stellar Om Source, Emeralds, and Oneohtrix Point Never,
who create cosmic minimal sounds that embrace ideas of
futuristic/primitive technology, outer space, and psychedelic fantasy.
What fundamentally distinguishes Noveller from these other contemporary
artists is that, while they construct synthesizer-based soundworlds,
Lipstate relies solely upon modified and looped guitar compositions. By
manipulating guitar tones, Lipstate challenges established conceptions
of the instrument, pushing it beyond itself and renewing its
sound-modalities to manufacture an even more otherworldly, transporting
sonic dimension.
“Rainbows” instantly erects a colossal wall of distorted, but
intricate and textural, guitar tones that fuse with squealing high
notes flickering above the thick, pulverizing drone. The lone, floating
phrases and sound warbles on “Brilliant Colors” take on the form of
electric stars bouncing off each other: their sound echoes leave bright
glitter traces behind them. Still, a dark disposition and heavy
mechanical themes loom underneath. The album takes a more meditative
turn with “St. Powers,” showing Lipstate producing soothing sound-moods
that feel incredibly vast and orchestral. This orchestral and nuanced
droning is accompanied by spectral shimmers created by playing with the
tuning pegs and cascading, impressionistic harmonic loops that blur
into each other and expand. “Tunnels” may be the darkest moment of Red Rainbows,
producing the sensation of being stuck in the belly of a colossal ocean
vessel, or at least in some gnarly subterranean lair, while
simultaneously experiencing the most intense and disorienting visual
and aural psychotropic hallucinations.
Lipstate is joined by electronic experimentalist Carlos Giffoni on “Bends,” the near-20-minute-long final movement of Red Rainbows.
Alongside Giffoni’s futuro-electro-experimentation, Lipstate’s
alien-sounding guitar technique sounds at home. As the sonic phrases
curve out into space, it is impossible to not visualize the peaks and
troughs of the sound-wave cycles. Further, aside from this visual
dimension, Noveller’s music is architectural: the structural sonic
layers build upon one another to create complex and subtle worlds of
visual sound. This makes Noveller’s music exceptionally interesting for
the adventurous listener, who is provided much space for rewarding
exploration.
* * *
The enhanced CD version of Red Rainbows includes four minutes from Lipstate’s sixteen-minute short film Interior Variations and a fragment of the Noveller song, “Telecine,” from Paint On The Shadows.
We are presented with an x-ray image of a human skeleton, namely
focusing around the neck and skull region. Pulsating underneath the
bone lines and slowly moving jaw are shifting color patterns and
ephemeral drops of color. They begin to rapidly modify in shape and
texture as the sound phases intensify and scream. The closeup view
makes the familiar human form appear foreign, similar to how Lipstate’s
recontextualization and approach to guitar transform the familiar into
the unfamiliar. The result of this recontextualization is that we can
experience new and minute variations that would previously go
unnoticed, thus furthering our understanding of sound and image and the
complex relationships between them.
1. Rainbows
2. Brilliant Colors
3. St. Powers
4. Tunnels
5. Bends