Yann Novak - Discontinuity (2026)

Discontinuity was conceived as a response to the deteriorating conditions in the U.S. I examined on my previous album Continuity. Media capture, heightened surveillance, and the consolidation of control over our information have reshaped our world, and I wanted to see what resistance might look like by gathering a polity of remixers.

Where Continuity traced how systems designed for transparency instead function as tools for manipulation, Discontinuity responds by presenting the remix as an analog for personal resistance: the individual act of reclaiming control through deliberate obfuscation.

In a landscape like this, resistance can take many forms: privacy tools that create gaps in data collection, platform exodus that breaks the continuity of surveillance, adversarial noise that degrades the accuracy of aggregated information. These are active interventions, deliberate remixes of the data streams these systems extract from us. When we deploy these techniques, we reconfigure what can be known about us, transforming the legible into a semi-legible facsimile of the original.

Discontinuity mirrors this process. The three tracks from Continuity exist as coherent statements, complete pictures built from discrete elements. To create the raw material for the artists to work with, I dismantled each track into its original stems, undoing my compositional process and offering them as individual components. The artists—Lawrence English, Timothy Fairless, mHz, Geneva Skeen, Jonathan Snipes, Ian Wellman, and myself—each worked from the deconstructed elements of one of the tracks, reconfiguring them with discontinuity in mind.

What results are seven new works that retain something of the originals while being obfuscated through each artist's unique manipulation. The degree and character of each remix reveal as much about the artist's process as it does about my initial intent. Each artist's approach offers a new dimension, and each remix embodies refusal itself: a different tactic for becoming illegible within a system increasingly designed to monitor and predict behavior.