Alva Noto

From an Alva Noto performance you expect a clinical, precise setting, one able to showcase the meticulous care given to sound and visuals that accompany the German artist's set. An open, linear environment, cold and spatial.

The Museo Marino Marini turns out to be a rather unorthodox and unusual choice against those expectations. There's no stalls area or space set aside for the audience. Dotted with sizeable works and statues, it's a jagged map that the crowd has to adapt to. This isn't the space of an auditorium or a theatre, but of a museum built to host thoughtful visitors and observers - not a music audience.

Chosen by International Feel to host its concert series (which will soon feature Fennesz, Carter Tutti, Mouse On Mars etc.), the museum was a risk, perhaps even a genuine gamble. But it paid off handsomely, both in terms of taste and in its ability to shape a new idea of artistic space. A small space, but attended to down to the smallest detail, an experience for a deliberately "limited" audience, able to make use of the space in a new way - more direct, and capable of immersing the listener fully in the music.

Alva Noto was, in fact, just a few feet away from us, beside the enormous screen. He gradually drew us into a universal matrix, whose upheavals and settlings unfolded in a deformed, glitched-out order. Mathematical lines and geometric interference evolved in a natural, composed way, in an electronic breath that gathered every single element around itself. The isolated, minimal elements of the videos collided and distorted, giving rise to a dead channel, aimed straight into the interior of the circuits.

Amid the crowd, stillness and concentration merged with the matrix on display in all its cerebral nakedness: a deconstruction in full flux, caught between saturation and a primordial dualism.

The set, predictably, is shaped by his latest release (Univrs, 2011), and is built along an unbroken line, interrupted only in a couple of spots for mental breathing room. It will ideally close with the Kraftwerk-like "Uni Acronym", with its orderly stream of consciousness of logos and its synthesized, robotic voice.

A broad, dense climax that permeated the entire performance. An environment entirely governed by sound, free of distortions or needless extremism.

A solid starting point for International Feel and a deep experience for the audience's minds.

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