NOVAK, YANN - The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past

The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is the latest album by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak, and his second for Touch. It considers the relationships between memory, time, and context through four vibrantly constructed tracks that push Novaks work in a new direction while simultaneously exploring his sonic past. The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is composed as a sonata -- a single gesture broken into four parts -- that meditates on the inevitable progression of time. The albums conceptual roots stem from The Archaic Revival (1991) by American ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna. In it, McKenna theorizes that when a culture becomes dysfunctional it attempts to revert back to a saner moment in its own history. He suggested that abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, and rave culture were proof of this default to a more primal time. The texts idealism was influential t