Desert Fires by Noveller

'Desert Fires' is Noveller’s full-length follow-up to last year’s No Fun debut 'Red Rainbows'. The sounds on 'Desert Fires' express a compositional evolution from layered loop-based drone work to more expansive formal arrangements of swells, throbs, tones and shimmer. Where 'Red Rainbows' presented an anthology of studies in technique—from early bedroom recordings to Noveller’s first exploits in the studio— 'Desert Fires' illustrates a refined, deliberate meditation on the physical relationship between Lipstate and her electric guitar. Handling the instrument as her muse, Lipstate summons a sonic palette so rich as to challenge the listener to conceive of how it’s housed in a single instrument manipulated by a solitary performer.

Opening track, “Almost Alright,” stakes claim to ground in territory charted by Fripp & Eno or synth-heavy contemporaries Emeralds, and leads the listener into the spacious, sprawling landscape of 'Desert Fires'. “Kites Calm Desert Fires” is a sandstorm of rich, percussive guitar, warm humming bass and swirling rhapsodic chimes. “Toothnest (for Chris Habib)” arrives at an idyllic sonic plateau of windswept fuzz and tremolo, then charges blindly with a soaring guitar solo evocative of bagpipes triumphantly marking a return from battle. Closing track “Fades” is the precipitate of a fragile complexity of deeply sensual sonic reactions—physically pairing texture, air and chance with the strings of Lipstate’s guitar—it exposes the emulsion of one’s ears to the light of Noveller’s sounds.

Noveller is the solo project of Los Angeles-based guitarist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate. Handling the electric guitar as her muse, Lipstate summons a sonic palette so rich as to challenge the listener to conceive of how it’s housed in a single instrument manipulated by a solitary performer.

sarahlipstate.com
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