Alva Noto - Beyond Electronics

Post-modernity is common heritage, but what makes an artist great lies in knowing how to interpret it, in becoming oneself an instrument of decoding, both object and subject, agent and guinea pig. In this respect, Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, is certainly one of the world's leading artistic figures who, ranging across different fields of expression, has managed to decode modernity in a wholly distinctive and independent way.

Carsten Nicolai was born in 1965 in Berlin. From a young age, while earning a living as a gardener, he developed a deep passion for avant-garde art, and between 1985 and 1990 decided to study design in Dresden. In 1992 he founded the cultural centre Voxxx.kultur Und Kommunicationszentrum, while in 1999 he launched Raster-Noton, a label at the forefront of electronic music production worldwide.

At the start of the Eighties, when Nicolai was a teenager, the computer revolution was taking hold: the personal computer was no longer a mirage but a tool within everyone's reach. And it is precisely with the PC, paradigm of the modern world, that the artist increasingly began to engage, and with it the very meaning of art started to shift. Over three thousand years of human history, art necessarily had to serve as a historical and cultural legacy; with modernity, that conception crumbles. Art's historical weight gives way to an overall redesign. No longer works meant to endure through time, but compositions and installations to be built and dismantled, in an endless game of interlocking pieces. Art, increasingly a puzzle and less and less organic, embraces the path of compulsive defragmentation. The contemporary artist composes and decomposes using the most varied tools, not necessarily material ones. Carsten Nicolai, through his various monikers, explores sound with a thoroughly contemporary approach.

In a sort of back-to-the-future move, much like the early positivist and Enlightenment scientists, Alva Noto shapes a wholly secular and immanent creature, devoid of any emotional impulse, self-contained, atonal and two-dimensional. In his heterodoxy, he reveals to the world the art of the third millennium: decomposition. Bouncing off cold structures, Carsten Nicolai's scaffolding is made of glitches, drone-ambient backdrops, algebraic curtains. Alva Noto's music generates and reproduces itself; it is matrix.

City Lights – The Noto Experience

Carsten Nicolai's career officially began in 1996. Raster-Noton released Spin, a rather raw debut that nonetheless hints at the full potential of the Berlin artist. 24 stray fragments follow in quick succession. The loops, woven together according to precise compositional techniques, stand out against minimal electronic backdrops.

Just a year later, Nicolai shaped his second creature, ∞ (for convenience, "Infinity"). No title was ever more prophetic. ∞ is a highly complex work, built on algebraic-geometric sonic inlays. Seventy-two stray fragments grind away at the listener's hearing, whether due to the work's complexity or the rawness and airless intensity with which it is presented. Nicolai still travels along alien, futuristic tracks, projecting us into a parallel universe of glitches and cybernetics.

Such is the coldness and the utter lack of melody that one might almost question whether ∞ is of human origin at all. Tracks of negligible length (there are plenty between 2 and 20 seconds) are followed by others that are meant to form the backbone of the work: the opening track, suspended between a constant bounce and faint tinkling, is certainly one of the album's most inspired moments, the sixth track repeatedly plays with frozen glitches, and the thirty-sixth features a captivating, barely-there drone threaded with a muffled beat. However, as the minutes pass, the game—already fairly heavy-going in itself—ends up becoming tedious. The work therefore needs to be read not purely in terms of listening pleasure, but in terms of its overall artistic value. While it will prove jarring from a musical standpoint, it will certainly appear innovative from the standpoint of the search for new sonorities.

Telefunken does not depart from the compositional principles outlined so far. Across the roughly twenty minutes in which its 31 sound segments unfold, Noto further explores the boundaries of sound, arriving perhaps, given the shorter overall duration, at a more potent and dense synthesis. Amid frantic wing-beats and televisions with no terrestrial signal, Noto once again pushes the sensory experience to its extreme, destroying and shattering it.

Autorec (45 minutes) marks a substantial turning point. Shedding his role as sound vivisectionist, Carsten Nicolai crafts his most accessible work. By reducing the complexity of the tracks and, on average, extending their length, Noto moves beyond mere experimentation, erecting a thinking creature. And although the two opening tracks don't exactly bode well, caught between deafening silences and densely fluttering wingbeats, "Kristalgitter" unleashes glitch slashes that graft themselves onto a drone proceeding in regular waves. The arctic shivers of "s16" paint a snowbound picture, while "Dicht" elevates isolationism to the highest degree. Amid flatline spasms ("Sinus Pulse"), deep ripples ("Geiger 2") and ambient-flavoured cerebral expansions ("Snow Noise Fragment"), the least cerebral record of Mr. Nicolai's career comes to a close.

The definitive consecration – Alva Noto

Starting in 2000, Carsten Nicolai decides to begin recording material under a new moniker, Alva Noto. Although his label had already been founded a year earlier, Prototypes is instead licensed through Mille Plateaux (whose roster, let's recall, boasted leading names of the electronic scene: from Vogel to Gas, from Terre Thaemlitz to Dela). The ten tracks making up the record confirm a Nicolai in a state of grace. Through meticulous cut-and-paste work, Alva Noto shapes three quarters of an hour of electronic inlays at extremely low frequencies. Dissecting glitches that are at times grating, he alternates playful underwater fantasies ("Prototype 7") with pitch-dark expanses ("Prototype 10"). And where the path turns treacherous and glacial ("Prototype 3"), the sun doesn't appear but hides behind nocturnal explosions observed on radar ("Prototype 4").

The art through which Alva Noto communicates grows ever more unapproachable, cryptic and mysterious.

A year passes before Transform can see the light of day. By toning down the extremity of the sound in favour of a more accessible musical scope, the German artist reaches one of the peaks of his career: a journey through the circuits of a computer, among calculators and numbers.

The work, divided into ten "Modules", runs to nearly an hour of listening, a stretch of time in which isolationism reigns supreme. The sensation of being immersed in a vast nothingness pervades the spirit, a nothingness electrified by sharp magnetic discharges. The glitches fence with foils, unleashing unpredictability and speed of execution, piercing the hearing clean through. The curtains of drone in the background mark out an apathetic, phlegmatic pace. We move from the sinister defaults of "Module 9" to the needle of the turntable skipping in the void of "Module 8", from the bleaker visions of the Pan Sonic school ("Module 5") to the slight glitch-ambient relaxations, nocturnal in flavour, of "Module 3".

Offering a broader compositional range, with more than one tonal variation, Carsten Nicolai projects us forward, into the near future, into a Matrix where it won't be us dancing in the club, but machines and robots.

After shelving the Alva Noto guise for three years, in 2004 Carsten Nicolai releases a triple EP. Transrapid, the first chapter of the triptych, marks a new departure: while keeping the lucid, calculated use of glitch as its load-bearing structure, the Berlin-based composer takes a further step forward. If in his previous works screeches and crackles were grafted onto the ambient substrate with regularity, in Transrapid the glitches are elevated to beats. No longer, or not only, sinister broadsides, then, but increasingly evident rhythmic elements. Such is the case with the masterpiece "Funkbugfx", over eight minutes of glitch that cut crisply into the base, building its very structure. In the short circuit of "Pulse", densely packed beats chase one another in a way that cries out miracle. And while "Future" enchants with its crystalline architrave, goaded by electric tremors, "Highmatrix" is isolationism in its gaseous state, amid soft distortions and spectral background sizzling.

Transvision marks a new chapter in Nicolai's sonic research. The emergence of decidedly more geometric structures found on the first EP is partly confirmed here. The opening "Remodel" is a Dada-futurist gem, run through with sharp rhythmic incursions and distilled dewdrops. "J" proves to be a foray into the multiform territories of the debut, while the bleak electro-industrial visions of "Postfabric" and the computerised gait of "10" are automatons with a soul.

Transspray stands as one of the most disturbed and disturbing works in his entire output. Eliminating any geometric temptation or melodic aspiration, Alva Noto shapes an EP that is pure terror. Unmooring melody, glitch and ambient base from one another, Nicolai builds a wall of terror constructed from noise surges, pure unbridled confusion. Deconstruction here reaches a basic level. Probably, though, the melody is shattered and splintered to excess, and on the whole it can be called a "minor" EP, if we set aside the excellent "Bit".

In 1996 a work is released that is considered minor, but which actually carries significant weight when compared against Nicolai's dense and extensive discography. For is an album structured in nine tracks, each dedicated to artists across different fields: from John Cage to Suchan Kinoshita, from Peter Roehr to Elfriede Jelinek.

Eliminating the tensions and anxieties of his previous works, Alva Noto sets about composing liquid sketches and arctic spaces. The ambient component, which from here on will become ever more pronounced, gains the upper hand over the glitches. The screeches still chase one another, but in a far less chaotic way. On the contrary, they now accompany the melody. The sonic filigree, between hibernated nocturnal photographs ("Transit") and faint sinister hisses ("Station Reno"), freezes slowly, now in sudden jolts ("Gulf Night"), now with a playful motion ("Flashforward"), until it reaches the album's sublimation point, the diamond-white purity of "Odradek", amid the faintest of undulations and gulps of the purest oxygen.

As mentioned, For represents a decisive watershed in Alva Noto's career. The ambient soundscapes, once secondary tools and minor players, see their role grow in importance within the compositions, becoming true co-starring actors.

Xerrox Vol. 1, made up of fourteen tracks, is instead a journey through Nordic lands. The first in a series of five releases, Nicolai's new work updates the classical experience for the laptop era, erecting a monumental wall of terror and forging a contemporary sound that looks back to the past.

The tracks (short and medium-to-long pieces alternate steadily) are genuine sensory experiences to be lived through in their full unfolding. The celestial progress of "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)" opens onto paradisiacal visions, unfurling majestically across the two climaxes that run just beneath its surface. And even where the noise element seems to gain the upper hand, melody takes over, ferrying the most extreme impulses toward decidedly more reassuring shores ("Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Airfrance)").

The approach to sound material has thus shifted quite radically: just listen to the frenetic flapping of wings in "Haliod Xerrox Copy 6", which sets off toward a melodic trail, or the martial advance of "Haliod Xerrox Copy 1", which flows into a solemn sonic wall of drones.

The greatness of Xerrox Vol. 1 comes to full bloom in the closing tracks too: "Haliod Xerrox Copy 111" is a drone-ambient cascade that winks at the most emotional strain of shoegaze, while "Haliod Xerrox Copy 9" is twilight of the gods, suspended between mystical aspiration and a bottomless abyss. Moving away from glitch and elevating the power of drone to an art form, Alva Noto lays yet another stone on a path already paved with great works.

2008 marks a momentary — yet again — change of course. Unitxt is a return to the roots. Glitches forcefully come back into play, while ambient vapors act as occasional walk-ons. Amid scrapes and a notably firmer rhythm section, what lights up a work that perhaps suffers too much from comparison with the Ep trilogy are driving kick drums ("U_04", "U_08-1", "U_03"), gentle broadsides ("U_09-0") and fragmented textures.

The second part of the album consists of glitches generated from the most ordinary Windows programs (from Power Point to Word, from Excel to Soundmaker).

Overall, Unitxt thus proves to be a work probably past its expiry date, but still of definite interest.

Alva Noto likes to roam through a candid, transparent and granular ambient music, and this new release, arriving two years after the previous one, is a clear demonstration of that.

Xerrox Vol. 2, laid out across eleven tracks, doesn't get lost in the easy clichés of ambient music, instead adopting an exploratory, forward-looking approach that finds its raison d'être in alternating suspensions and breaths with field recordings and samples.

And while the dark droning landscapes brushed in by feedback seep under the skin, the pasty amalgam and subtle hums offer up heavenly visions not far removed from the wave-like motions of Pan American. The natural rise and fall of the sound, at times somewhat shoegaze ("Phaser Acat 1"), gradually gives way to green Irish fields ("Soma"), breathing new life into the lesson of Brian Eno.

Disproving the impression of being suspended in an imaginary mid-air excursion are the scratchy squalls of "Meta Phaser", which starts out docile and rises up menacing, somewhat Pan Sonic, somewhat Black Dice. The mood shifts radically: now it's the sinister crackles, propped up by pulsing digital beats, that keep the ship steady through the storm ("Sora"), which, despite glimmers of light in the first two episodes of "Monophase", claims its victims, letting them slowly agonize in the final droning expanses.

Weaving together a multitude of loops, tamed and handled with mastery, Alva Noto builds a multiform, kaleidoscopic landscape that, deep down, still always remains itself.

Four years later comes the follow-up, For 2. Released by the excellent label of Taylor Deupree, the twelve tracks making up the album show a side of Alva Noto that doesn't align with his current or past output. There are no epic drones flowing like magma, nor icy scaffoldings of glitch. For 2 lives shut away in a cold, limpid isolationism, broken by monochrome tones onto which the shyest of rhythmic sections are grafted. The immersion that Carsten Nicolai theorizes here is tied to a silent, almost imperceptible unfolding.

The velvety backdrops turn now toward snowy expanses (the opening "Garment (For A Garment)"), now toward mirrors refracting their image at different angles ("Sonolumi (For Camera Lucida)"). And amid faint sighs ("Stalker (For Andrei Tarkovsky)") and glitches that are never intrusive ("T3 (For Dieter Rams)"), moments of pure solitude play out. The air grows rarefied all the way to a gorgeous conclusion: in the seven minutes of "Argonaut-Version" the sound material turns warm, wrapping the listener in soft, rising velvety touches.

For 2, probably destined to be set aside when reflecting on Carsten Nicolai's mammoth discography, instead marks a further step forward in a musical output as vast as it is in constant progression.

In univrs, the second installment of the 'uni' trilogy, the first part of Nicolai's career — the one grounded in music that turns into mathematics — merges with the second, in which the German artist has probed the boundaries of ambient-drone. And it's a fusion that borders on perfection.

Not just glitch and extremely blurred electronic backdrops, but also a pursuit of the robotic, alienating beat that is the trademark of Byetone. The contours are indeed made of beats and glitches, but almost always muffled and often incisive. Alva Noto's is a sugar-coated nastiness, one that never truly hurts, but opens the mind, frees it, empties it.

univrs is a space in constant ferment, teeming with photographs of neutrinos and photons that are launched, made to detonate, and set back into motion. A motion inscribed within a cosmic void, which flattens the potential disruptiveness of sound, handing it back to us restrained within its own shockwave.

It wasn't until 2018 that the vertical bar sanctioning the conclusion of the 'uni' trilogy would see the light of day. The final segment, UNIEQAV, seems to have less the character of a sound installation and more that of an album in the classic, almost "retro" sense, with stylistic choices that in several cases harken back to the now-distant 90s.

Stretching things a little, we could even call it his own "Selected Ambient Works": a measured essay in sound design that, over the cold rigor of controlled chaos, favors atmospheres suited to listening that needn't be especially attentive, even welcoming faint melodic traits that would have been absent in the first two-thirds of the project – almost as if we were dealing with a Wolfgang Voigt converted to high frequencies.

The coexistence of deep textures and digital pinpricks on the surface, carefully divided between the stereo channels, creates the illusion of a three-dimensional perspectival space, in many cases close to the dark, post-human imagery of Pan Sonic, but also to the rougher side of the soundtracks by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Despite its relative variety of solutions, UNIEQAV undoubtedly represents the most introverted and "conservative" side of the series it brings to a close. An ending in understatement, perhaps meant to act as a counterweight within the overall economy of the macro-work, but certainly not a grand finale.

Emerging from the conceptual experience with Anne James Chaton, Alva Noto tries again, still on Raster-Noton, with HYbr:ID I (2021), an album that returns to focus on the watts and impedances of a sound that has by now come to define him.

Nicolai again draws on geometry, building an electronic architecture centered on the figure of the oval, in relation to humanity and identity. A circle, the perfect geometric form par excellence, which shapes and alters its radius, directing its growth according to external interactions. Just as bosons ("Oval Hadron I and II") collide inside a vibrating atom, or a fertilized egg within its nest, a planetary ellipse. The cosmos at the dawn of time. And the personal cosmos. Much can be traced back to the figure of the oval; every track on the album, through its title, seems to want to turn its attention to its infinite variables, more or less concrete and abstract.

Musically, rather than echoing his latest experiments with Chaton, we're closer to episodes from the beginning of his career, in particular "Prototypes", "Transrapid" and, above all, "Opto File", an album that has fallen quite into the background of his discography, submerged beneath the electro-cosmic epic of the various "Xerrox" volumes, for which Alva Noto is surely best known to most. Besides the aforementioned, and the albums with Ryuichi Sakamoto, which earned him recognition even beyond the borders of IDM music, through the collaboration that led them to develop the soundtrack for "The Revenant", the records from Alva Noto's early phase are remarkable. With Opiate, real name Thomas Knak, he had opened a small, more relaxed and less kinetic sonic parenthesis, which already contained in embryo the sound of this "HYbr:ID I". Another absolutely certain source of inspiration is Mika Vainio, who passed away some years ago now, to whom Nicolai seems to pay tribute precisely through the lower frequencies and the floating echoes typical of the Scandinavian producer. Indeed, it's impossible not to hear echoes of Ø in "Oval Blackhole", which in fact cites the sounds of "Oleva" and "Konstellatio".

And Alva Noto continues his trajectory into the depths of sound, picking up Vainio's baton. "Oval Spin", another undeniable nod – this time, with no shadow of a doubt, to Edgar Froese – seems to come straight out of some basement of the Zodiac, the historic club opened by Roedelius (Cluster) in Berlin, from which all kraut research was born.

With "Oval Asimoo" the album unfortunately dips a little, as the nod to the founder of Pan Sonic comes across as really a bit excessive: it genuinely sounds like it could be any track off "Oleva", such is the resemblance. Perhaps it's the nostalgia for his colleague making itself felt; let's remember the two collaborated and played live together on several occasions. We might say that, as far as the genre known in jargon as glitch is concerned, the triad of Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto have repeatedly traded off their charisma, and are, barring perhaps a few British cases and their variants (Four Tet), the genre's main point of reference. With "Collider" we return more to Nicolai's own footsteps, with a powerful syncopation that drives toward the album's close. A close, indeed, marked by this synergistic exchange between Ø's typical basslines and Alva Noto's accelerations ("P-Dance").

The closing "Oval Noise" strongly recalls the hyperspace of Xerrox, closing the album in a rarefied, stellar atmosphere; an album that suffers a good deal from its slavish homage to Vainio, but one that remains a pleasure to listen to.

Various collaborations, and then some

Carsten Nicolai has undertaken many collaborations over the course of his long career. In the late 90s, together with partners Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider, he formed the trio Signal: the extremely rare EP Waves + Lines preceded by two years the debut album Centrum, in which the three musicians involved in the recordings produced an absolutely representative compendium of the new glitch electronics. The album is the second volume in the Raster-Static series. Signal would return after a long hiatus in 2007 with their excellent second album, Robotron: Carsten, Olaf and Frank, who had by then become pillars of the digital age, surprised their audience by releasing one of the most communicative records of their careers. Robotron marks the beginning of a turning point in Alva Noto's career, as well as being one of the most accessible releases in the entire Raster-Noton catalogue.

In the early 2000s Alva Noto released the CD Uniform, documenting a performance held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on March 3, 2001, for the opening of the exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times", given by Alva Noto himself together with Scanner. The two musicians display the most experimental side of their art, and without the aid of visuals, listening to the CD suffers from excessive conceptualization. The album contains a single twenty-five-minute track which, on closer inspection, adds little to either Carsten Nicolai's career or that of his friend Robin Rimbaud.

That same year saw the release of the self-titled CD by Cyclo, a collaboration between Nicolai and the Japanese artist, transplanted to New York, Ryoji Ikeda. The work is decidedly experimental and abstract, based on the studies both musicians were carrying out on the relationships between sounds and images. For Ikeda, it was the year of the seminal "Matrix", released on Touch. Cyclo certainly deserves credit for having captured the state of electronic experimentation at the turn of the millennium, but with the passing of time the listening experience has grown heavier, and those same acoustic solutions, innovative at the time, were later expressed more effectively on subsequent albums by both Alva Noto and Ryoji Ikeda.

Also in 2001 came the first collaboration with Opiate (Danish musician Thomas Knak in everyday life), Opto Files. The EP is part of Raster-Noton's "Static Series" and, like the label's previous releases, comes housed in the signature silver anti-static sleeve. The four tracks on the record are built on languid, idm-tinged spectra with pronounced melodic content. Alva Noto revisits some ideas already explored on his solo album Trasform and reworks them within the organic pantalassa of Knak's electronics. Opto Files is one of the essential records for understanding the transition into the digital age.

Four years on, 2nd returns to the scene of the crime, but in the meantime the boundaries of the genre have shifted elsewhere (toward the New York of Basinski, Chartier and Taylor, for instance). This obviously takes nothing away from the beauty of certain fragments on this record; if anything, it's a reminder that, within border music, the value sometimes lies precisely in standing on the event horizon. It's no surprise, then, that the spectral depth of the fifth track on the running order sounds far more convincing than the sluggish glitch rhythm of the one that follows.

Far more fruitful (and long-lasting) is the collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. The first meeting between Alva Noto and the famous Japanese composer gave birth to Vrioon, released in December 2002 by Raster-Noton on both CD and transparent vinyl. Surprisingly, the melodies played on piano by Sakamoto seem to find a regenerating backbone in the glitches orchestrated by Alva Noto: the alchemy works to perfection on the opening "Uoon I", where Nicolai's glacial sine waves set the melancholy notes of Sakamoto's piano adrift.

The intro of "Duoon" is breathtaking: Nicolai builds a silent, Arctic lullaby in the vein of Mum around Sakamoto's piano; just before the two-minute mark, the atmosphere dries up and the sound plunges into a glacial abyss. For some, Vrioon represents the updated version of the collaborations between Eno and Budd from twenty years earlier.

Sakamoto falls in love with the treatment Alva Noto has been able to bring to his music. It's no surprise, then, to find the German musician's name among the guest list (which also boasts names like David Sylvian, Arto Lindsay, Amedeo Pace, and Rioichi Ikeda) of his new album, "Chasm" (Warner, 2004).

A few months later, on March 20, 2005, Raster-Noton released the new collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Insen. By the end of the year it would be named electronic album of the month by the prestigious British magazine The Wire.

The record confirms Nicolai's remarkable ability to reinvigorate the languid, at times mannered style of Sakamoto's pianism, as can be heard on the exquisite "Logic Moon". "Aurora" continues along the same lines as the earlier Vriooon. "Berlin" is among the most accessible tracks in Alva Noto's entire career, with the German musician showing he can build even simple rhythmic structures with powerful emotional impact.

The following year, during a long European and Asian tour by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, a twelve-inch on transparent vinyl was released featuring three new tracks, Revep. Twenty minutes of music that add little to what the previous two collaborations had already shown. Even the much-anticipated reworking of Sakamoto's classic "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" (already transformed back in the day into "Forbidden Colours" on a famous David Sylvian album, "Secrets Of The Beehive") fails to produce the hoped-for effect. Either way, the vinyl sold out in next to no time, as does most of Raster-Noton's output, whether CDs, vinyl albums, books or posters.

To celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city of Mannheim, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the music featured on their live CD Upt_. The record was recorded on November 16, 2007 and released two years later, again by Raster-Noton, in an elegant cardboard sleeve featuring one of Carsten Nicolai's geometric constellations on the cover, containing a CD, a DVD and no fewer than two booklets, one with the musical score and the other with images and text.

The DVD contains footage of the concert (74'21") and a "try-out" (38'46") documenting both the work in progress and the final result. The DVD is NTSC, region free, in both stereo and 5.1 surround. The audio CD contains 72 minutes of music: one long piece divided into ten parts (and 21 sections) joined together seamlessly. Alva Noto makes his presence felt immediately with his light drones and silences beneath the menacing advance of the cellos. Sakamoto's piano hovers over the music like a ghost, only fully revealing its physical presence during the two "broken line" sections. The orchestra accompanies both musicians, underscoring now the coldness of their intentions, now the romanticism of their spirit.

The fifth chapter of this fruitful collaboration arrives in 2011 with Summvs, a genuine testament to everything the two have never said before, a synthesis that imbues the setting with a renewed familiarity, an epiphany of both the whole and the individual parts, united once again in their tireless tendency.

"Microon I" is the album's airy opener, with a vaguely oriental hum, sinuous like the few, carefully weighed notes that punctuate it—dark, almost mystical, sensual and intoxicating. A track that suffers from being too short, its linearity further disrupted by "Reverso": a ticking sound marks out a desperate, metropolitan pulse, within which noisy flashes and shrill metallic bells dance against Sakamoto's swelling harmonic minimalism. Everything seems calculated down to the last detail, studied with mathematical complicity, yet despite this one can't shake the underlying impression: Noto and Sakamoto are playing in separate rooms, each perceiving only echoes of the other's music filtered through drywall. Their eyes are closed, yet they seem to see each other all the same.

The jolting wake-up call comes with "Pioneer IOO" and its sterile white noise, with splashes of white-hot metal cooling in an unexpected turn. The rhythms grow tighter and the piano explores its lowest octaves on "Ionoscan" in a crescendo of emotional tension, building to an unexpected climax: "By This River". The famous opening notes of the historic piece by Eno–Roedelius–Moebius are dissected into a dense succession of beats, in dialogue with brief glitches and simple piano phrases, part of a rigorously spaced-out yet explosive accompaniment.

Roughly six years pass between the conclusion of the VIRUS cycle and the reunion that produced Glass, years during which the Japanese maestro largely withdrew into a period of isolation, due in part to his 2014 diagnosis of throat cancer.

Recorded live after just a single rehearsal, this singular performance amid the glass walls of the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, designed by architect Philip Johnson in 1949, fully confirms—albeit in different ways—the "ritualistic" approach of Noto and Sakamoto, aimed here at re-establishing the partnership forged in the golden years of raster-noton.

In this precise context, more than ever, there's a strong echo of the visual and sonic geometries of Eno (already crystallized in the slow-motion of "By This River"): nonetheless, a leaden, persistent low-end drone lends a dark shading capable of widening the gap between the two.

The gestures of the two masters are at once spontaneous and controlled, gentle yet resolute in relation to the various sound sources and surfaces they've set up. Nicolai works small bronze cymbals with a bow, while Sakamoto brushes a mallet across large Tibetan bells; the same wide windows, struck with fingers or rubbed with rubber mallets, become a sonic "canvas" thanks to contact microphones. Noto's signature radar signals grow so thin and continuous that they become an invisible part of the main fabric, over which pervasive chimes, tinkling sounds and faint cascades of artificial noise prevail.

In 2010, alva noto and Blixa Bargeld of Einsturzende Neubauten released first a twelve-inch (Ret Marut Handshake) and then an album (Mimikry) under the name anbb. The starting point behind Mimikry is rather simple: grafting Bargeld's dark, sometimes near-psychotic declamations onto Noto's leaden soundscapes, packed with noise textures, glitch touches and ambient passages. The result, however, is not a simple sum of parts but a true fusion. In the dark, frozen pagan ceremony of Fall, in the flashes of homicidal madness of "Once Again", in the leaden synthetic chamber lied of "Bersteinzimmer", in the unsettling, hysterical crescendo chant of "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground", in the meat-grinder mass of beats on "Mimikry", in the infernal dancehall of Berghain, in the tormented "Wust" (rocked by sudden electronic deflagrations) and in the glitch-flavoured perversions of "Katze" (featuring Veruschka, Sixties fashion icon), a crime is committed: the murder of Man. Blixa's voice, in fact, is absorbed into the synthetic blob created by Alva Noto, to the point of becoming an integral part of it, an inseparable element indistinguishable from the myriad loops, manipulations and digital effects that make up the scores of the ten tracks. The Voice, in short, loses its humanity and becomes a mere instrument, even when it still seems to glimmer with a spark of life. The wonderful cover of "One" by Harry Nilsson feels like a drop of calm amid the storm.

Contribution by Riccardo Zanichelli ("Summvs"), Marco Loprete ("Mimikry") and Michele Palozzo ("Glass"), Matteo Ortenzi ("HYbr:ID I")

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