In case you missed it, over at Headphone Community, we just kicked off a month-long deep dive into the world of Yann Novak, a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist, composer, and owner of the influential Dragon’s Eye Recordings. For his April residency, Yann will be sharing plenty of music (full lossless digital albums you can download and own with Bandcamp codes), detailed conversations on everything from his sound design to running a label (in which you can participate, by asking Yann questions directly on the platform), and of course, some previously unreleased tracks, which I’m also sharing with you on here today. This is a piece originally appearing on his 2025 album, titled Continuity, which I have selected as one of the best albums of the year, in the appropriately titled Music For Bending Light And Stopping Time. The album examines “the paradoxical nature of truth and transparency in our contemporary information landscape,” exploring how our devised systems and instruments for transparency create the exact opposite of their intended effect. Benn Jordan’s recent well-researched campaign against Flock Safety comes to mind. This piece is a live rendition of “Context Collapse,” performed by Yann at Dronebath Edition 003 in Los Angeles, California, in July of 2024. In the context of this theme, it’s both unsettling and reassuring at the very same time.
For most of my career, albums started as performances, were refined through iteration, and ended their lifecycle as an album. During the pandemic, when performances were not possible, I shifted to making the album first, and then a few of them had to be deconstructed into a form that could be performed. Continuity was my return to the performance-first lifecycle. Context Collapse [Live] is an excerpt from the first performance of the material that would later become Continuity. It was performed in a boiling-hot DTLA warehouse during the peak of summer, called Dronebath, organized by Halston Bruce. She was kind enough to allow me to release the excerpts and to host me so I could try out this new material for a live audience. The compositional approach differs from the album, but the loops and sounds themselves should be familiar. The opportunity came through my good friend Garek Druss, who we recently lost, so these live tracks from Dronebath are dedicated to him. The show flyer was also designed by Garek.
— Yann Novak
The full album, Continuity, released and mastered by Lawrence English on his amazing Room40 imprint, is available directly via Yann’s Bandcamp. Stop by Headphone Community and see for yourself how, with deeper focus, fewer algorithms, and more human interactions, we’re trying to bring back what we’ve been missing for a while — honest words on honest music.
