ALVA NOTO - Xerrox Vol. 2

Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, is one of those artists who plays with sound, twisting it, turning it over, transforming it. Listening to "Xerrox Vol. 2", the second installment in a series meant to run to five titles, what emerges are faint ambient swells that reverberate now impetuously, now placidly. Alva Noto likes to roam through a pristine, transparent, granular ambient music, and this new release, arriving two years after its predecessor, is a limpid demonstration of that.

The journey of "Xerrox Vol. 1" was a genuine back-to-the-future trip: updating the classic experience to the laptop era, Carsten Nicolai built a monumental wall of terror, forging a contemporary sound that looked back to the past. This new effort, spread across eleven tracks, doesn't fall into the easy clichés of ambient music, instead adopting an exploratory approach aimed at the future, one that finds its raison d'être in alternating suspensions and breaths with field recordings and samples.

And if the dark drone landscapes brushed in by feedback creep under the skin, the thick, pasty amalgam and subtle hums conjure paradisiacal visions not far removed from the tidal motions of Pan American. The sound's natural ebb and flow, at times faintly shoegaze ("Phaser Acat 1"), gradually gives way to lush Irish fields ("Soma"), ideally rejuvenating the lesson of Brian Eno.

Dispelling any impression of being suspended in some imaginary mid-air excursion are the scraping squalls of "Meta Phaser," which starts out docile and rises up menacingly, somewhere between Pan Sonic and Black Dice. The mood shifts radically: now it's sinister crackles, propped up by pulsing digital beats, steering the ship through the storm ("Sora"), which, even amid the glimmers of light from 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 consummate mastery, Alva Noto builds a multifaceted, kaleidoscopic landscape that, deep down, remains ever true to itself. Gorgeous.

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23/03/2009