radio cegeste / lee noyes 'to orient themselves with coastlines' released on idealstate recordings

with the prospect of the Radio Cegeste / Lee Noyes live collaboration coming to an end for the foreseeable future upon Lee's relocation from Dunedin, NZ to Gothenburg, Sweden in the final days of 2011, his decision to release two site-specific recordings we had done in the previous months as a four-track album on his own idealstate label resulted in to orient themselves with coastlines (ISR2-12), in an edition of 100 copies. With the official release date as the 7th january 2012, these are at the time of writing available at the idealstate site, and via French distributor Metamkine.

...performing with Lee Noyes at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 28/1

"Lee Noyes and Sally Ann McIntyre performed first. Sally had amassed a curious collection of items to toy with – and in a speculative facebook post early that day she mused over the outcomes of a meeting between “ a mini-FM transmitter, a bakelite valve radio, a homemade kitset theremin, six identical pocket size transistors, a 78rpm record from the 1940s featuring "master radio canaries" (a gift from John Demetrick), field recordings made in the grounds of seacliff lunatic asylum, and a small music box that plays edith piaf's l'accordeoniste...” . Noyes utilized his famous mini-sized kit, this time stripped back to absolute bare boner. What occurred was simply gorgeous – the FM and valve radios effervesced and tittered, radio emits a sound so archetypal to those of us with a penchant for information and paranoia, grey sound – empty fuzz such a narcotic delight in my childhood... 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 for McIntyres radio-orchestration. Melody enters as McIntyre spins the haunting 78 and manipulates music box, the evocative multi-verse of source materials create a new world. There is a delerium to this performance. The birdsong and field-recordings created a sense of the baroque and the oriental, like a scene from an islamic garden of delights... birds and warm sweet breezes, beneath which rivers flow. And so I attended my first improvised performance of radio and drum. And I don't think any one else would have had the imagination and responsive sensitivity to make it work. Bravo Lee and Sally."

- Matt Middleton, writing in his blog La Decennie Brut