Blone Noble Credit: Matthew Moyer

Dance with new-wave crooner Blone Noble and his synthesized torch songs at the resurgent Panic! night Friday in the Milk District.

“It [Blone Noble] was a way to have a more full way of living,” sole Noble-man Patrick Salaway tells Orlando Weekly. “It’s being revealed to me through the act of doing it.” 

For chameleonic Los Angeles-based artist Salaway, Blone Noble was his first mask-as-creative persona that felt authentic, so he dove in headfirst. This persona allowed him to create his own reality, through a louche “deviant-pop” vessel. 

“From the earliest age, I kind of lived in this alternate reality of my own making,” Salaway says. “And the necessities of reality always kept pulling me back, but I think I’ve successfully committed entirely to my own world.” 

Growing up in Chino, California, in the heart of the Inland Empire, Salaway was shaped by a scene of punk rebellions, one that offered a glimpse into the life he wanted to create for himself. Through Blone Noble, he found a way to channel that vision into a collage-like project made up of 1980s aesthetics paired with his own poetry and writings.

Salaway says the Inland Empire’s punk scene played a formative role in shaping both his identity and sound, offering him an outlet that contrasted with the silent, oppressive life he lived in high school.

“As early as I can remember, I knew I wanted to be a performer,” Salaway says. “All the older people in my life, I just couldn’t wrap my head around why they wouldn’t want to do something fun and exciting, instead of coming home from their jobs and complaining all the time.” 

Salaway says he had no idea that music would become his path, recalling that he was initially drawn to extravagant storytelling set in worlds beyond his own, like Popeye, Jurassic Park and James Bond. 

“I wanted to do that, I was always making costumes and thinking of my life. I just knew I would do something, I thought, in movies,” he says. 

It wasn’t until Salaway was given an old beat-up Squire guitar for his 12th birthday by a friend’s dad that he started his music endeavors, learning power chords and starting a punk band with like-minded peers. 

“From then on, I just always had bands,” Salaway says. “It was punk that kind of woke me up to this alternate reality that I could be living in.”

Much of Salaway’s sound stems from a need to escape the workaday world and live life on his own terms, existing entirely within the world he creates with his art. “I am definitely committed to living in a world that I’m creating,” he emphasizes. 

One of Salaway’s daily rituals that spur him on creatively — or even just help him make it through the day — is writing prose, after getting into the habit of journaling 15 years ago.

“It turned into a daily thing I needed to do. It’s a function really, I realized that if I didn’t do this thing, I just felt off-kilter,” Salaway says. 

Through this writing practice, he chooses lyrics and scrapbooks his art into the musical mask of the synth-driven Blone Noble. His favorite part of making music is to write meaningful lyrics, but through a careful harvesting of his previous drafts and ideas and themes.

“I’m not that kind of songwriter, you know, I like to tell stories,” Salaway says. 

After years of not quite fitting the Cinderella-shoe of sound in previous projects, Salaway says that he needed a persona that he could perform through, like David Bowie or Peter Gabriel used. It felt more authentic to him to channel his songs through the voice of a character.

“It feeds me more, I get more out of it, rather than approaching it just myself,” Salaway says.

Salaway’s previous project of 10 years, the cosmic rock & roll band Veneer, felt somewhat like an apprenticeship to him, and was the first musical project that he embarked on in his adult life. Still, it wasn’t a mask that fit. 

“I couldn’t figure out a way to represent it visually in a way that felt satisfying,” Salaway says. “I needed the mask, and Blone Noble is that for me. It’s like sort of a prism that I shine this thing through and it does something else.” 

To Salaway, this persona-as-mask is essential to preserving his own inner life. While picking the mask he wanted to use, Salaway had to make the conscious decision to deviate from the monotonous grind of everyday life, like keeping a job he had no interest in keeping just to survive. 

“Choosing a mask that I want and throwing that out there in people’s faces, like really putting it out there, it has this sort of freeing effect, to where it has become so strong for me that it eradicated all the other masks that weren’t working,” Salaway says. “Those aren’t necessary anymore, because I’ve just got one good one now.”

Salaway’s collection of discarded misfit masks led him to his goal: a life authentically lived through collaging his passions onstage. Finding it almost impossible to function without expressing himself through this mask, a sonic epiphany came in the form of putting aside the guitar in favor of a synth. (This writer gets it; more synth, please!)

The other catalyst for Salaway’s Blone Noble was 2020’s shutdown of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading him down a rabbit-hole of writing and eventually finding the sound he calls “doomsday disco.” And then the name? Well, it fortuitously just fell into his lap.

Initially encountering “Blone Noble” in a word jumble that was left out somewhere, everything fell into place. Here was a name that encapsulated all the aesthetics of his project: lyrics collaged from past prose, pop provocateurs of days gone by that inspired him and a heavy, romantic synth-pop sound.

“That combination of words just really stuck with me and felt really evocative. I couldn’t get it out of my head,” Salaway says. 

Now Blone Noble is preparing to release a new EP, Dominator. Seeking to create music custom-built for the dance floor, he and collaborator James Matthew Seven produced the title track seemingly on the spot. And so a tone was set. 

“It just kind of happened naturally and I was touring a lot, but I thought, instead of writing from an intellectual place — since I’m always focused on lyrics and a message — for this I just wanted to write banging pop songs that would get people moving,” Salaway says.

Friday’s Panic! showcase should be an excellent test run for these songs, as this is a crowd hungry to get down on the dancefloor, soundtracked by Blone Noble, opener Ortrotasce and the resident DJs. Move your body to  these synthy confessions of a mask.

9 p.m. Friday, May 22, Iron Cow, 2438 E. Robinson St., facebook.com/ironcowsushilounge, $17.85.

This article appears in May 20-26, 2026.