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Alva Noto: u_08
From the album Unitxt (2008)
The German musician Carsten Nicolai is one of the most prolific and fascinating contemporary figures working in the fertile territory between the experimental and popular wings of electronic music. Nicolai’s music, created primarily under the stage name Alva Noto, undermines the pretentious self-absorption of electronic “art” music by making it dance, and attacks the cozy vibes of popular electronica by disrupting its carefree grooves with rhythmic twitches and replacing its polished sounds with lovingly crafted cacophonies of digital noise.
Nicolai’s music ranges virtuosically from minimal atmospheric drones and whispers, to lush textures of unrecognizably altered samples, to spastic glitch-funk orgies. In his sonic vocabulary, with its predilection for pure sine tones, raw waveforms, and blasts of white noise, I hear a link to the seminal productions of elektronische Musik created at the studios of West German Radio in Cologne in the early 1950s. In contemporary terms, Nicolai’s work bears a strong affinity to the electronic music of the Finnish duo Pan Sonic. (Nicolai collaborated with Pan Sonic’s Mika Vainio on the 1997 album Mikro Makro and the 2001 release Wohltemperiert.)
In 1996, Nicolai founded the record label Raster-Noton, on which many of his subsequent releases have appeared. He has also been active as an multimedia installation artist: his work in this regard spans music, image, and spatial design, and includes the 2004 piece syn chron, described as a “an integral sculpture of light, sound, and architecture.”
Played 70 time(s).
January 06, 2011, 10:25am
