Best known for writing credits on Cruel World, Pretty When You Cry and Flipside on Lana Del Rey ‘s acclaimed 2014 album Ultraviolence, Blake Lee is now set to release his own album No Sound In Space on 15th November with Kenyan sound artist KMRU’s label OFNOT. This Los Angeles-based composer’s debut mines his preoccupation with the unknown and every self-respecting soft boy’s favourite film 2001: Space Odyssey. The effects are spectacular, like fireworks.
What we find on the No Sound In Space video, released just last week, is a new theme that acts as a companion to the up-coming album. It includes an excerpt from Echoplexx that is split into Echoplexx I and Echoplexx II on the 10-track album, that puts the Echoplex pedal front and centre distorting the sound of Blake Lee’s guitar into a synthetic drone sound. This painterly approach to sonic layering is very much part of the codes of ambient music that Blake picks up on. The artist locates these two tracks as the most experimental on the album.
Like the 2001: Space Odyssey sound track, there is a reverence for classic composition in this video, whereas the feeling of the overall album dips into more experimentation. As the music video opens with flashing different coloured light on Blake Lee’s face, he makes another (more explicit) reference to the film. The cinematic has long been an interest for the musician. Open to discuss the similarities and differences between this his ambient album and ongoing indie pop work with Lana Del Rey, Blake shared, “Lana’s music has always been cinematic to me with a lot of depth” going on to note, “I tend not to focus on genre and more on the creative spirit. Sonically, I feel there are loose ties to 1960s psychedelia, bands like Pink Floyd and Broadcast in terms of creating certain atmospheres, and also My Bloody Valentine in the way the guitar and other sounds are obscured and blurred into one another.” No Sound In Space is instrumental.
Impacted more conceptually than sonically by adapted recordings, specifically the Voyager and Cassini recordings, of black holes that produce sound outside of the human range of hearing, No Sound In Space as an album is interested in the human experience. Prioritising both visual and sonic silences and minimalism in the video for No Sound In Space Blake Lee faces head-on the expansiveness of space as well as the gap between vibrations output and what is quote unquote heard.
It’s impossible to not comment on the extremely sexy choice of red shiny catsuit made by Kiyomi Hara and worn by dancer-choreographer, Kylie Shea who takes centre-stage in the video. Blake Lee denies a corelation between his consistent work with female collaborators, instead he suggests, “It’s always necessary to collaborate and create in an egoless environment that serves the art, and I feel fortunate that this was the case” whilst also admitting all the producers and Director of Photographer are women. Interested most in symmetry and composition, this piece wasn’t intentionally the catwoman answer to 2001: Space Odyssey, yet it does explore a certain contemporary idea of beauty.