Raub Roy is a multidisciplinary sound artist renowned for his immersive and experimental approach to electroacoustic music. Performing under the monikers Horaflora and Scy1e, Roy has been crafting intricate sound worlds since the mid-2000s. His live performances are built on low-tech ingenuity – novel arrays of semi-autonomous devices that surround the audience with unpredictable sonic phenomena. This element of surprise is intentional, keeping listeners (and even the artist himself) in a state of discovery with each performance.
As Horaflora, Roy’s work explores “articulated space, psychoacoustics, and pushing the limits of depth and detail in perception.” He often deploys an array of small, self-made sound makers distributed throughout the venue, each contributing to an enveloping soundscape. “Hora Flora” began as a tongue-in-cheek name (from “horrific flora”), reflecting the idea that each device is “a microcosm amongst the macro... each object is its own little world” within a larger sonic ecosystem. This intuitive, environment-driven method embodies influences from avant-garde pioneers like John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, and acousmatic composer François Bayle, emphasizing sound not just as music but as an experience of space and perception. Roy’s dedication to experiential art runs deep – in 2008 he even undertook the Cycledelic Music Trip, a two-month tour from Maine to Florida by bicycle, performing nightly and documenting the journey in a travelogue blog. This adventurous spirit early on exemplifies the outside-the-box ethos that continues to inform his practice.
In 2017 Roy launched Scy1e, a project born from adapting his process to tighter living quarters and late-night creativity. Where Horaflora relies on interdependent acoustic objects, Scy1e translates those ideas into a purely electronic realm – “attempting to transmute rhythmic electronic music to fringe variants of perceivable patterns and phrases.” Scy1e pieces tend toward shorter, beat-oriented forms, built with modular synths and digital tools, yet they retain Horaflora’s intricate, tactile sensibility. Despite the different instrumentation, Roy notes that the two aliases share a similar dynamic character, as he continues to blur boundaries between chance and composition in both projects. Always walking the line between control and chaos, he strives to move beyond a “whatever happens, happens” approach toward new structural breakthroughs without losing the element of serendipity.
Roy’s performances double as playful experiments in sound. Using idiosyncratic tools – balloons, an electric toothbrush, modified speaker cones, transducers, and an arsenal of repurposed cassette players – he builds experimental cassette feedback systems that fill the space with evolving textures. These homemade contraptions, often arranged in feedback loops, act like living instruments: once set in motion, they interact in semi-autonomous ways. The result is a cornucopia of aleatoric (chance-driven) sounds, from skittering mechanical chirps to resonant drones, all coalescing into a cohesive atmosphere. By embracing unpredictability in his setup, Roy ensures that no two performances are ever alike – each show is an ephemeral installation, “utilizing novel arrays of semi-autonomous devices and techniques to keep the audience, as well as himself, surprised.”
Beyond his own performances, Raub Roy has made a mark as a curator and community organizer in the experimental music scene. In 2012 he co-founded Weird Ear Records in Oakland with partner Dianne Lynn, establishing a home for disparate forms of fringe sound. The label’s tongue-in-cheek motto – “The Weird Ear, The Better” – serves as a curatorial credo, guiding a catalog that ranges from musique concrète oddities to avant-garde electronics. During the same period, Roy and Lynn ran a beloved underground venue in a decommissioned church (cheekily named Life Changing Ministries), where they hosted over 100 experimental acts between 2012 and 2015. This inclusive, D.I.Y. space became a hub for adventurous music, embodying Roy’s belief in cultivating community around exploratory art. Through Weird Ear and the venue, he has helped nurture fellow sound experimenters, reinforcing that his role in music extends beyond artist to facilitator of a “weird” and welcoming creative ecosystem.
Roy’s collaborative spirit continues in his recent duo Dovetail with Dianne Lynn. The pair cultivate improvisational soundscapes through “compromise, negotiation, and deep listening” – a musical conversation between Lynn’s electric bass and Roy’s electronics (including a custom mouth-held speaker instrument). Their performances draw on a shared love of quasi-repetitive, drifting phrases and textures, all processed through a looping effects system that gnarls and regenerates their output “effectively the third member of the band.” In Dovetail’s fluid improvisations, one can hear Roy’s ethos of shared exploration: two minds creating a single, evolving sound-world neither could predict alone.
Never one to shy away from audacious experiments, Roy also recently assumed the alias Sighwonee for a genre-blurring project: a chopped-and-screwed style reimagining of André 3000’s 2023 ambient-jazz flute album New Blue Sun. This unofficial remix album, released semi-anonymously on cassette, slows and warps André’s two-hour opus into a surreal deconstruction that Roy described as more of a “gnawing and slurring” than a typical chopped-and-screwed edit. He fed the entire album through a chain of analog effects, “crinkling and collapsing it until it feels like the end-point of a fully disintegrated Basinski loop.” The result is a woozy, otherworldly soundscape where fragments of the original peek through a haze of tape echo and distortion. This bold tribute – equal parts homage and abstraction – exemplifies Roy’s penchant for bridging musical worlds, filtering a mainstream touchstone through an experimental lens.
Raub Roy’s ever-expanding body of work, from Horaflora’s spatial sound experiments to Scy1e’s electronic mutations, from curating “the weird” to reinventing a pop icon’s opus, paints a portrait of an artist constantly pushing boundaries. In all these endeavors, he treats sound as a living, breathing medium – one that can transform rooms, ignite imaginations, and reveal the hidden wonder in every tone and texture.