Charles K. Noyes has long occupied a distinctive place in American experimental music, first emerging as a percussionist and improviser in the late 1970s before moving through a wide range of Downtown New York, Bay Area, and electroacoustic contexts. His early solo cassette Devil Trap, recorded at home in 1978 and later remixed and mastered by Elliott Sharp, already showed his interest in raw, self-contained sound worlds, while his 1982 zOaR album The World And The Raw People placed his drums, percussion, and saw alongside Lesli Dalaba, Henry Kaiser, and John Zorn, establishing him within a vivid network of free improvisers and experimental instrumentalists.

Over the following decades, Noyes worked in and around groups and collaborations including Material, Toykillers, Carbon, The Golden Palominos, and Invite the Spirit, while also appearing in contexts involving musicians such as Darol Anger, Danny Davis, Sonny Sharrock, John Zorn, Moroccan Gnaoua musicians, and other figures from the experimental, improvising, and cross-cultural music worlds. That history matters on Blue All, because the album does not present guitar as a late-career detour so much as another extension of Noyes' long practice of treating instruments as resonant systems — struck, scraped, amplified, warped, and set into motion.

Noyes' more recent guitar work came sharply into focus with Crimes In High Places, Pt. 1, where he sought to develop a personal electric guitar language that acknowledges the radical implications of Derek Bailey while remaining rooted in the charged physicality of the instrument itself. That trajectory continued through the pandemic-era duo Besotted with Elliott Sharp, an electroacoustic exchange between Noyes' electric guitar and Sharp's extended strings, analog synthesizers, soprano saxophone, and bass clarinet, and through Noyes' appearance on Sharp's I Never Metaguitar 6, a compilation devoted to contemporary approaches to solo guitar.

With Blue All, Noyes brings that language into a more solitary and concentrated space, recording directly to stereo without overdubs and shaping electric guitar, effects, and Ferrous into nine pieces that feel suspended between improvisation, electroacoustic composition, and private ritual. The literary fragment from Agota Kristof's Yesterday gives the album a striking philosophical frame, suggesting a music in which time collapses into a continuous present, where childhood, weather, memory, and landscape exist simultaneously as inner experience.

Across pieces that range from brief flashes to extended, immersive forms, Noyes turns the guitar into a site of unstable resonance, where metallic attack, electronic shadow, decaying harmonics, and haunted melodic traces gather into a stark and deeply personal sound world. In relation to his earlier percussion work, his collaborative history, and his recent electroacoustic guitar recordings, Blue All feels both like a continuation and a distillation: a solitary document of sound as memory, vibration, and time held in suspension.

"Time is ripped apart. Where are the wastelands of childhood? The elliptical suns frozen in black space? Where is the path left hanging in the void? The seasons have lost all meaning. Tomorrow, today, what do these words mean? There is only the present. One time, it snows. Another time, it rains. Then there is sunshine, wind. All that is now. It has not been and will not be. It is. Always. All at the same time. For things live in me and not in time. And, in me, everything is present."-Agota Kristof, Yesterday