Big Noble was not supposed to create an album. This is an ongoing project of artistic collaboration – the result of a musician (Kessler) and a sound designer (Fraioli) experimenting with sounds. You could say that's how most artists work. But this story is a little different.
Projection suivie d'une conversation (en anglais) avec Daniel Kessler d'Interpol
à l'occasion du premier album de son nouveau projet Big Noble
The story of Big Noble is rooted in the New York City base of the duo. Daniel Kessler – at the time label manager for experimental electronic label, Caipirinha – met sound designer Joseph Fraioli when he signed to the label under the alias, Datach'i. As the two moved on, Fraioli released ten critically acclaimed albums as Datach'i, and founded sound design company Jafbox Sound. Kessler went on to form the band, Interpol, and has released five commercially and critically acclaimed studio albums.
In 2008, Kessler and Fraioli finally sat down to collaborate. Fraioli had taken on a film project, bridging from Kessler's unmistakable guitar sounds, he added tonal textures resulting in a web of enveloping melancholia. This original collaboration spawned the infancy of Big Noble, and Kessler and Fraioli’s desire to create sonic landscapes that would draw a listener intimately closer to Self. The sound is thick, a maze of polluted vibrancy. Guitar is prominent throughout, but with every listen, more detail is revealed inside and outside of the music, and underlining the conceptual core within.
Fraioli describes the intentions of Big Noble as “immersive, perspective changing, intimate.” He goes on to say, “sonically a lot of the arrangements feel technically vast, however there’s an intimacy that I hope listener’s will find addictive to escape within."