about

Lee Noyes (b. 1977) is an improvising musician working with feedback-electronics, percussion, sampling and strings. A former resident of Dunedin New Zealand, he was from mid-1990's until 2011 an active participant in the vibrant New Zealand experimental music scene. For the last 11 years he has been based in Gothenburg, Sweden where he currently holds permanent Artist in Residence at the Elementstudio for electroacoustic and *other* musics. Collaborative activity has always been of primary focus. Current work in live and studio settings in Gothenburg has seen him working regularly with Swedish sound-artists Rasmus Persson, Barrie James Sutcliffe and Gabriel Edvinsson. He has, however consistently engaged in collaborative projects with artists around the globe, including Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, Sally Anne McIntyre (Radio Cegeste), Lance Austin Olson, Johnny Chang, Paolo Chagas, phil hargreaves, Phil Brownlee, Bruno Duplant, Massimo Magee, Richard Sanderson, Christian Munthe, Barry Chabala, Motoko Kikkawa, Miguel A. Garcia, Jeff Henderson and many more. He has performed concerts throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe and Scandinavia and has had his music published on, among others Infrequency Editions, Insubordinations, Confront, Con-V, Banned Tapes, A Beard of Snails, Ilse and his own Idealstate Recordings (est.1996). As an improvisor he is 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 being relative and secondary to a striving toward the ideal. To this end, Noyes finds 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. His music has thus been described as simple and intimate, awkward but agile, gorgeous... and even christened under the inherently contadictory genre-moniker "Harsh Silence".
  • "Noyes utilized his famous mini-sized kit, this time stripped back to absolute bare boner. What occurred was simply gorgeous – Noyes mirrored the chatter and crunch of radio by stretching drum-skins, scraping and sucking, blowing and shuttling, his kit transforms into an ululating backdrop... There is a delerium to this performance. And I don't think any one else would have had the imagination and responsive sensitivity to make it work."Matt Middleton - La Décennie Brut
  • "Every gesture is prudent and well-placed. Sticks, knuckles, brushes, fingertips, rubber balls, eraser-on-paper emulations etc. join skin and metal, Noyes analyzing all areas of his drum and cymbal with creative kindness/coercion... With extreme simplicity, intimacy at its most familiar and acute patience, Noyes... craft(s) intrigue."Dave Madden - The Squid's Ear
  • "Noyes manages to balance the tensions between sounds, noises and notes, by sprinkling a few short, sensitive melodic phrases or disseminating the rubbing and scraping wood and strings of his piano, in a territory that hesitates between the parentage of John Tilbury and Magda Mayas."Julien Héraud - Improv Sphere
  • "History feels challenged... very tense, angular work that succeeds through its own awkwardness and ability to sound unlike much else I have heard in a while."Richard Pinnell - The Watchful Ear
  • "Noyes, the free-improv percussionist, folds and subsumes his contributions into the whole."Jesse Goin - Crow With No Mouth