In 2005, Sarah Lipstate stumbles upon a call for submissions: Ubuibi Records is looking for a troupe of female noisemakers for its new compilation project, Women Take Back the Noise. Noveller, her solo project, is born. But Lipstate is by no means a novice; for one year now, she has been cruising the open roads of Texas with Carlos Villarreal under the moniker One Umbrella, Telecaster in the trunk and pedals in her pockets. After relocating to Brooklyn, she expands her repertoire to include the minimalist punk of Rhys Chatham (she is a regular member of his ensembles) and to the verse-chorus noise rock of Parts & Labor, with whom she recently ended a year-long collaboration. Following in the footsteps of Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Kim Gordon, and other female bigwigs of the No Wave era, Lipstate resurrects both their hardware and their certainties: no, the electric guitar is not only for men. And yes, noise is for girls, too.


Sarah Lipstate doesn’t need much to summon her singular sonic universe in to existence, somewhere between a stately ambience and a vertiginous noise: a double-neck guitar rested flat on its back, a ring modulator, a delay pedal. Her Paint on the Shadows LP (released on No Fun Productions last April) and forthcoming Red Rainbows CD (anticipated for September) register as a continuous organic pulsation, built upon strata of looped chords and harmonics–or, if we listen even more closely, the beats occasioned by near-identical frequencies rubbing against one another. Below, a tranquil humming sound extracted with a bow or eBow, wavering between Arthur Russel’s melting cello to Tony Conrad’s strident violin. Above, a multitude of aural epiphenomena, both voluntary and accidental: fractal prisms of harmonics, hesitant melodies either half-sketched or obstinately repeated, ensnared in an endless quagmire of phasing. If the sculpture fashions his object from the outside in, defining its contours from the exterior, Lipstate dives straight into the heart of her working material (sound), molding it from the inside, inviting it to take shape, to push outwards, to unfurl. The sound sculptures that result are at once elegant and ephemeral.
It is hard to describe the pleasure we experience when we listen to these pieces: the intellectual pleasure of the experimental? The slightly perverse pleasure of the spectator observing a tightrope walker at the circus, secretly hoping that he will fall to the ground (in my experience, one of the major thrills of experimental music, in any of its incarnations)? The sensual pleasures of hypnosis, of falling into a  trance (is there not something unmistakably psychedelic in this infinity of bouncing harmonics)? One thing we can say is that Sarah Lipstate forms part of a growing faction of noise musicians ready to do more than declare war against music and harry its listenership with the painful (others might say: emancipatory) effects of distortion and overdrive. Moreover, her pieces make use of means outside the traditional vocabulary of “music”: the epiphenomena of noise and silence, quasi-melodies arising out of repetition of primitive motifs, actual melodies that are aborted, the uncoiling of structure like a spiral. In doing so, they give rise to a hybrid work of art, one whose building blocks are not necessarily that of music, nor entirely that of sound sculpture. They are, after all, music, and not just performance. And we can derive honest aesthetic pleasure from them–something that is rare enough in the world of noise to merit being pointed out.

Words: Sophie Pécaud
Translation: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Chronicart, September 2009.

Tags: Carlos Villarreal, No Fun Productions, Noveller, One Umbrella, Paint on the Shadows, Parts & Labor, Red Rainbows, Rhys Chatham, Sarah Lipstate, Take Back the Noise, Ububi Records

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