Photo by Caroline Contillo 2009
“Some artists traverse boundaries. Sarah Lipstate’s work seems to come from a world where they never existed. Her color-rich visual art has a mournful literary quality to it; her short films trigger collisions of emotional crosscurrents; and her instrumental music, which she makes under the name Noveller (emphasis on the middle syllable), seems to call to attention all senses at once, to the point where even the word music seems somehow limiting.” – Time Out NY
“…simultaneously soothing and mind-wrecking noise, along with a compositional depth that most loud-for-the-hell-of-it guitar droners never reach.” – NY Press
“…hypnotic, rich-textured electric guitar works.” – New York Times
Noveller is the solo project of Brooklyn-based guitarist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate. Handling the electric guitar as her muse, Lipstate summons a sonic palette so rich as to challenge the listener to conceive of how it’s housed in a single instrument manipulated by a solitary performer. Her one-woman guitar soundscapes have captured the attention of NPR, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and The Wall Street Journal. In addition to recording and performing music as Noveller, Lipstate has recently starting working with composer Nathan Larson on several feature film scores. The D.C. based ensemble, Low End String Quartet, recently commissioned Lipstate to compose a piece for their 2012 season. Lipstate has collaborated with several renowned musicians, including live improvised duo performances with Carla Bozulich, David Wm. Sims, and Lee Ranaldo. She has previously performed as a member of Cold Cave, Parts & Labor, and One Umbrella. Lipstate has also participated in Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Army, Ben Frost’s “Music for 6 Guitars” Ensemble, and Glenn Branca’s 100 guitar ensemble.
She released her first two full-length albums on Brooklyn noise label No Fun Productions in 2009. In 2010, Lipstate started her own imprint, Saffron Recordings, as a vehicle for releasing the Noveller full-length ‘Desert Fires’ and a split LP between Noveller and unFact (David Wm. Sims of the Jesus Lizard) titled ‘Bleached Valentine’. Her latest full-length, ‘Glacial Glow’, was released jointly through Saffron Recordings and Weird Forest in May 2011.
Lipstate’s festival performances include the Suoni Per Il Popolo fest in Montreal, No Fun Fest in NYC and Sweden, Decibel Festival in Seattle, Ellnora Festival in Illinois, New York Guitar Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Kilbi Im Exil in Zurich, and Unsound in Krakow. Noveller has toured the U.S. and internationally, at times supporting acts such as Xiu Xiu, the Jesus Lizard, U.S. Girls, Aidan Baker, and Emeralds.
Her short films screened at the SXSW film festival in 2006 and 2007, and earned Lipstate the “Diamond in the Rough Cut” award for exceptional emerging filmmaker at Cinematexas 2006. She debuted a new film, ‘Interior Variations’, at the New Museum as part of No Fun: Infinite Sound and Image in May 2009. The film also screened at the 12th Kyoto International Film & Video Festival in Japan, and as part of the ‘New York Avant Cinema Series’ at the 23rd Singapore International Film Festival. Lipstate’s film works were showcased in the Women of NY Cinema screening as part of the 2009 NY Eye + Ear Festival in Tribeca.
In March 2011, Lipstate showed ARTIFACT, a multimedia installation exploring process, rescission, and artifact in film and sound, at Splatterpool Artspace in Brooklyn. She collaborated with Chris Habib to create an interactive personal echo chamber fitted with a cassette player running one pre-recorded tape loop. Each time a participant engages the echo chamber, a switch activates an erase head atop the structure deleting a portion of the audio randomly from the loop. As more people visit the chamber, more silence is restored to the tape.
Lipstate received a BS in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin in December 2006, and currently resides in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.
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