Hosted by Los Angeles DJ and journalist Chris Kissel, Contact Wave enthusiastically celebrates the best experimental, avant garde, psychedelic, and off-the-grid music crafted in L.A. and beyond.

This week’s episode featured a live performance and interview with Yann Novak. Novak is an artist, composer, and curator based in Los Angeles. His work is guided by his interests in perception, context, movement, and the felt presence of direct experience. Through the use of sound and light, Novak explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on our present location in space and time. Novak’s diverse body of works – audiovisual installations, performances, architectural interventions, sound diffusions, recording, and prints – ask participants to reclaim the present moment as a political act.

Novak’s work has been experienced through exhibitions and performance at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; The Broad, Los Angeles; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Mutek Festival, Montreal; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Soundfjord, London; Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and The Stone, New York, among others. His recorded sound works have been published by Crónica, Porto; Dronarivm, Moscow; Farmacia901, Berlin; Hibernate, Leeds; Home Normal, London; LINE Imprint, Los Angeles; Tigerbeat6, Los Angeles; and Touch, London, among others.