Artist Talk With Experimental Musician Raub Roy (Horaflora, Scy1e)

Experimental musician Raub Roy (Horaflora, Scy1e, Weird Ear Records) will present on his creative practice and ideas about sound, and demonstrate a few techniques as part of the School of Art & Visual Studies visiting artist lecture series.

Raub Roy has performed and recorded electroacoustic music as horaflora since 2005, and more recently (2017-present) as Scy1e. Performances are often based around low-tech immersive sound, utilizing novel arrays of semi-autonomous devices and techniques to keep the audience, as well as himself, surprised. Balloons, electric toothbrush, modified speaker cones, transducers, and a bevy of cassette walkmen, are some of the idiosyncratic tools in his stage performances.

He, with partner Dianne Lynn, founded Weird Ear Records, a record label reveling in disparate forms of experimental music. Their slogan, “The Weird Ear, The Better,” serves as a guideline to the curatorial themes across all of these projects. They hosted over 100 acts at their church-turned-underground-venue, Life Changing Ministries, between 2012 and 2015.

Roy has graced the stage with no shortage of luminaries of the global experimental scene, such as Rafael Toral, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Jan Jelinek, Nautical Almanac, Wolf Eyes, Robert Beatty, Lawrence English, and many others.

Some notable events he has performed include San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (he later served on their board), Soundwave Festival for the Arts and Sound, Gray Area SF, Indexical Santa Cruz, Brutal SFX, Savage Weekend, Weirdstock, and International Noise Festival.

He has released music on labels such as Phinery, Zero Point Research, Toneburst, Hot Releases, Enmossed, and No Basement is Deep Enough.