Composer and improviser Bryan Noll explores time and space with his musical project, Lightbath. Taking inspiration from Brian Eno's view of composers as gardeners, Noll plants musical seeds with his synthesizers and, through improvisation, guides their development and growth into pieces that unfold in the present moment.

“Working with generative processes on the modular synthesizer feels like a collaboration,” he says, “as if the synthesizer is alive and interacting with me. It’s an active meditation where I set the initial framework and just listen while remaining agile enough to guide the musical conversation.”

Noll developed his sound and process as Lightbath by making YouTube videos showing the physical act of coaxing music out of his colorful boxes of wires, knobs, and lights. As Pitchfork puts it: “Once you have submitted to these videos, it can be hard to pull yourself away. The artfully unpretentious demonstrations… occupy a strange, sui-generis niche: Featuring balmy sounds, blinking LEDs, and low-key set-dressing, they are part performance, part tech tutorial, and part audio-visual wallpaper.”

~

Listen to Lightbath’s split release with Emily A. Sprague on RVNG