Overview
With Slow Dismantling, Los Angeles based artist Yann Novak problematises understandings of ambience as homogenous and static. Slowly Dismantling deconstructs ambient, pulling it way from the blank and the atmospheric, refusing the perceived luxury of sound within which context is erased. Reflecting on his formative experiences as a queer youth in middle America, he explores the idea of these acoustic and social spaces as zones of liberation within which a spectrum of identity is formed. He creates a series of dense sonic fields that reflect on how the past can be decoded and utilised as a device for contextualising the future.
From Yann Novak
The cover of Slowly Dismantling features the remnants of Hotel Washington, home to the LGBTQ+ community in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin from the 70s until 1996 when it burned down. It housed a restaurant, a barber shop, a cafe, and an assortment of gay bars that served as a gathering space for the community. I was 17 when the hotel burned down and had only gone to the cafe a handful of times. What I expected to be the formative site for exploring my newfound queer identity was suddenly lost to the past, and I was left wondering how such a space would have influenced me.
What remained in Madison after the fire was only the mainstream version of gay culture. The expressive camp of cinematic cult classics, drag shows, and quotes from pop culture was the language, and I didn’t speak it. Art and music are often identified as "queer” when they share these same core aesthetics, tropes, and character stereotypes. These signifiers have become acceptable ways to to express queerness within the larger heteronormative and capitalist gaze. This further taught me that, though I was queer, what I was making was not.
This led me to withdraw; the alienation that came with my introversion made it hard for me to take up space in the world. As my work as an artist and composer progressed, this lack of self confidence became part of my practice. I began using field recordings as a way for me to limit my decision making. I could shape and mold this source material to an extent, but there was always an external structure. While this allowed me to create work that was autobiographical, I was never totally in control of what I was making; thus, I was never fully visible in the work.
This all changed following a transformative experience at a queer music gathering in the spring of 2019. I was finally immersed in a queer community that existed outside all dominant cultures, finally allowing me to feel seen as queer without any of the shortcomings the mainstream culture would have me believe. The acceptance and community I found there showed me the importance of identifying my work as queer—even if it does not deploy any of the codified tropes mainstream culture would be comfortable with—in order to make another version of queer visible.
As I worked through Slowly Dismantling, it became a liberation from and a reinterpretation of myself. It allowed me to shed my insecurities and routines: grounding my work and process in something outside myself. Instead I choose to utilize digital and analog synthesis, recorded at my studio in Los Angeles and reprocessing recordings captured at MESS in Melbourne and EMS in Stockholm. Using pure synthesis allowed me to make decisions that were totally my own and present an album that is more personal and honest than any before it.
Slowly Dismantling stands as a reminder that nothing is static; the world is ever-changing, just like our identities. It is an invitation to explore other modes of consciousness and the self, and it is these perpetual changes that make liberation possible.

Limited edition of 80 signed and numbered copies. Hand packaged in fold-out paper sleeves with handmade artwork, a hand-written track listing, a magazine insert and tracing paper and pencil inlays.
Recorded January 31 and February 1, 2008.

Debut from The Used who have performed on the Warped and Ozzfest Tours. Special Enhanced CD featuring a video of 'A Box Full Of Sharp Objects' plus 12 tracks. Features the single 'The Taste Of Ink'. 2002.

Founded 2008
Genre Epic Black Metal
Members Shield Anvil - Keys, vocals, guitar, bass, programming
Mortal Sword - Vocals, guitar, additional keys
Hometown Salt Lake City, Utah
Record label Northern Silence
Influences Summoning, Elffor, Nazgûl, Mantle of Dust, Bathory, Moonsorrow, Graveland, Sear Bliss, Vordven, Nokturnal Mortum, Rivendell, Blakagir, Wongraven, Lord Wind, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Diablo II, The Elder Scrolls, Conan the Barbarian, The 13th Warrior, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Lord of the Rings...
Current Location Salt Lake City, Utah

L.A.’s choral maestro Julianna Barwick channels Enya in the very seasonal-sounding beauty, ‘Circumstance Synthesis’, her most significant solo outing since 2016’s ‘Will’ album
In five pieces for voice and synth, ‘Circumstance Synthesis’ presents the naturally gifted artist at her most effortlessly wondrous and sublime, drifting cloud-like from the bleary dawn of ‘Morning’ to the wide-open, noctilucent formations of ‘Night’ in an ambient ritual for everyday use that takes in the plumes of warm synth air and convective harmonies of ‘Noon’, the keening, tremulous ululations of ‘Afternoon’, and the breezy, brassy, Vangelis-meets-Enya promise of ‘Evening’.

Rare Field Ceiling is the coldest Yellow Eyes record to date, and it is also the warmest. It is the most inviting, the most alienating, the murkiest and the sharpest, always falling apart and yet held together by a dawning sense that within the thicket is a vision of majestic clarity.
But as Rare Field Ceiling climbs and climbs, majesty becomes delusion and clarity becomes mania. Yellow Eyes have always held failure up to the light and found patterns in the glow, but here they trace a doomed arc and, with unnerving focus, follow it to the very end.
In the cryptic, labyrinthine tradition of Ved Buens Ende, Fleurety, and early Blut Aus Nord, Yellow Eyes play black metal, uncompromising and unbound. Rare Field Ceiling is the latest statement in an increasingly significant and singular legacy.

Explosions In The Sky will release its fifth album, titled Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, April 26 on Temporary Residence Ltd. Recorded at Sonic Ranch in El Paso TX by John Congleton and produced by the band, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care is the West Texas quartet’s first full length studio effort since 2007’s All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone. The record was mixed by Congleton at Austin TX’s Public Hi Fi studio and features artwork by longtime visual collaborator Esteban Rey.
Tickets are on sale now for Explosions In The Sky’s biggest headlining show to date: April 6 at New York City’s famed Radio City Music Hall featuring special guests Low and a first ever solo piano performance by Eluvium. The Radio City date is the first confirmed stop on Explosions In The Sky’s forthcoming 2011 tour, whose UK/Europe leg commences May 16 in Dublin and runs through May 25 in Amsterdam. Further dates will be announced as they are confirmed.
A second snippet of music from Take Care, Take Care, Take Care can be previewed at
. A first 47-second sample appeared on the site in conjunction with the announcement of the Radio City show.

The long-arc vision of Faith Coloccia / Mamiffer has deftly traversed a sonic terrain with an emotional depth and compositional restraint rarely found in contemporary music. Across multiple albums, EPs, and splits, she and her collaborators have tapped into the passionate elements of life—the sublime joys and the harrowing losses - while also providing a score to the less definable moments; the pensive times of solace, the dissonant chapters of uncertainty, and the meditative sojourns. Mamiffer’s latest album, The Brilliant Tabernacle, transmutes darkness and rejoices in the force of life by illuminating the beauty of creation. Beginning with a foundation of piano, organ, and voice, Coloccia enlisted her partner and long-time collaborator Aaron Turner along with a congregation of auxiliary musicians to help her construct “a guiding light” in the form of seven songs.
With The Brilliant Tabernacle, Coloccia has focused her work on encompassing the totality of the human experience. Herein she acknowledges both the joyful abundance and inherent suffering of life, while fostering a deep reverence for “pristine awareness” as accessed by the natural mind. This fecund drive was further bolstered by the birth of her first child after her last album The World Unseen. The attendant experiences with maternity—hope, love, strength, support, surrender, and more than anything, the cognition of the self at its most powerful: the embodiment of vulnerability—prompted the construction of The Brilliant Tabernacle.
The album opens with “All That is Beautiful,” a poetic salve buttressed by Coloccia’s piano, Jon Mueller’s communal drum patterns, Veronica Dye’s constellating flute, and Turner’s dichotomous combination of bucolic acoustic guitar and distorted squall. Amidst this backdrop of lilting major and minor key melodies, Coloccia weaves a private psalm of global stewardship and personal strength—a prime example of her music serving as a talisman in a labyrinthine world. From there the album segues into the aural blessings of “River of Light,” a psychedelic calling of drones, pulses, and melodic fragments, with supplementary vocals by Monika Khot. “So That the Heart May Be Known” is a blissed-out harmonic incantation, an amalgam of old world folk elements and modern minimalist composition colored by Eyvind Kang’s string arrangements. Coloccia’s lyrics once again serve the overall vision of reveling in the beauty of creation by repeating the cyclical mantra “How does it feel? / What do you know? / All love!” Coloccia asserts that her aim with Mamiffer is to create psychedelia without drugs and spirituality without the dogma of religion, and that principle is deftly achieved on “Two Hands Together” where graceful piano foundations channel lyrical parallel’s between the process of birth and the metaphoric rebirth of baptism, invoking a secular sense of wonder and magic towards both human biology and consciousness.
“Hymn of Eros” is the centerpiece of side 2, a kaleidoscopic inversion of side 1’s homespun musical traditions interwoven with the electro-acoustic emissions of synthesist Alex Barnett and waves of textured bass from Brian Cook. It’s the track that most closely recalls the ominous lurch and protracted abstractions of Mamiffer albums like Hirror Enniffer and Mare Decendrii, although the lyrical intent is perhaps the most pointed of any song on The Brilliant Tabernacle. “So many problems in the world stem from people who do not love themselves, and have lost a fundamental gift that should be everyone’s birth right: to be loved unconditionally and completely. Much of our conditioning has strived to detach humans from one another, to see difference as threatening instead of as a strength, to separate the bond with the mother and the earth, and this is passed down through the generations,” Coloccia says. “I felt this record was a complete psychic and magical observation of the healing power of true love, of respecting vulnerability, of not wanting to forget where we all come from- how we were all once helpless and all deserving of love.” The album closes with “To Be Seen,” a transcendental plainsong that brings the uninitiated into the fold while conjuring the inviting warmth and hallucinatory spirituality of Letzte Tage Letzte Nächte-era Popol Vuh or the hypnotic repetition of Asa Osborne projects like Zomes and Lungfish.
“The album as a whole represents a mythical narrative: the hero's descent into the darkness of the soul and the generational sickness of our current culture and its history, followed by the triumphant reunification with the primal deep of total love. This process generates the power to break the spell of linear time, thought and action, and produces instead a sense of cyclic and physio-psychic existence. It provides the opportunity to overcome indoctrinated amnesia, to uplift collective strength and allows for the restoration of in-born self-love” Coloccia says of The Brilliant Tabernacle. And indeed, the album is a journey through the dark and into luminous revelation, across a myriad of textures and timbres, at turns tranquil, turbulent, and surreal.
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”- James Baldwin

Amanda Ava Koci, known professionally as Ava Max, is an Albanian-American singer and songwriter. She signed with Atlantic Records in 2016, through which she released her breakthrough single, "Sweet but Psycho", in August 2018.