about
Lee Noyes (b. 1977) I am an improvising musician working with feedback-electronics, percussion, sampling and strings. A former resident of Dunedin NZ, I was from mid-1990's until 2011 an active participant in the New Zealand experimental music scene. Since then I have been based in Gothenburg, Sweden where I currently hold permanent Artist in Residence at the Elementstudio for electroacoustic and *other* musics.
Collaborative activity has always been of primary focus. The meeting of personalities and predilictions, the assertion or attenuation of will and ego in service of the music and discovering new versions of myself in working with others is an endlessly facinating part of my artistic practice. Current work in live and studio settings here in Gothenburg has me working regularly with sound-artists and musicians Rasmus Persson, Barrie James Sutcliffe, Tim Perkis and Gabriel Edvinsson and more recently as a member of Ebb & Flod, an electronic musicians-collective exploring performance-practice, composition and improvisation.
In addition to work locally I've consistently engaged in collaborative projects with artists around the globe, including Lance Austin Olson, Johnny Chang, Paolo Chagas, phil hargreaves, Phil Brownlee, Bruno Duplant, Massimo Magee, Richard Sanderson, Christian Munthe, Barry Chabala, Miguel A. García, and many more. I have performed concerts throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe and Scandinavia and have had music published on, among others Infrequency Editions, Insubordinations, Confront, Con-V, Banned Tapes, A Beard of Snails, Ilse and my own Idealstate Recordings (est.1996).
As an improvisor I am dedicated to the primacy of active-listening in collaborative settings and to the interplay of conscious & intuitive decision-making within live improvisation. Of specific interest is is the potential for compositional-thinking in improvised music settings, including but not limited to dialogic or narrative considerations, rather than 'sound-for-the-sake-of-sound'. Success in this goal is, of course, relative and secondary to the striving toward the ideal.
To this end, I find playing with contrasts (harsh sounds and harmonic sounds, noise and silence, consonance and dissonance, familiarity and surprise) to be the richest field from which to draw sonically; particularly in a post-everything sonic-landscape. My music has thus been described as simple and intimate, awkward but agile, gorgeous... and even christened under the inherently contadictory genre-moniker "Harsh Silence".