alva noto for soma’s ‘design’ issue

This is old news, but…

Alva Noto spans the digital divide, softly
Text: Alexander Provan

Carsten Nicolai’s performance of Xerrox in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in May was as much surgery as music. An array of computers and mixers replaced the patient on the operating table. Rather than displaying the surgeon’s forays into the body, a vast screen behind Nicolai burst with clusters of golden particles, images that might have come from a universe deep within guts of the computers. As the sounds—abstracted bits of Muzak, ring tones, advertisements, reduced to the point of incomprehensibility—came into focus and coagulated it became clear that Nicolai was raiding the body rather than repairing it, gradually extracting all its failed nerve endings and fractured sine tones to create a noisy opus of error messages.

Nicolai, who performs as Alva Noto, has been mining and designing sound for the better part of his thirty-nine years, ever since hearing the ghosts of Soviet military signals seeping through his radio as a child in East Germany. His work is generally sparse, glacial in pace, comparable to a sonic anatomy lesson, with the artist as pedagogue rather than magician. Orphaned frequencies and aborted pulses are placed under the microscope, deliberately manipulated and combined with other specimens. On 2001’s Transform, a handful of buzzing frequencies are treated like toothpicks, delicately molded and shaped into tenuous structures. If bent too far in one direction, they will splinter; they often do.

Besides his sound work as Alva Noto, Nicolai also owns the venerable Raster-Noton record label, which has released his own musical explorations and his three books of sound theory. Over the last decade, Nicolai has established himself as a major force in contemporary art, performing and exhibiting multimedia installations across the world, from the Biennale in Venice to the Guggenheim in New York to the Neue National Gallery in Berlin, which hosted his most recent major exhibition, “Syn Chron,” last year.

For “Atem,” at the 1999 Liverpool Biennial, the combined effects of subsonic bass rumblings and visitors’ footsteps in a gallery produced intricate patterns on the surface of water held in flasks on the ground—the visualization of psychoacoustic phenomena. “Snow Noise,” installed at Art Gallery New Sydney in 2001, artificially crystallized and preserved snowflakes, comparing this natural process to the mathematical creation of fractals, which were pictured on the walls.

In his recent collaborative work with Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, which includes Vrioon and this year’s Revep EP, circuitry and empathy are reconciled. Nicolai adroitly bends and shades Sakamoto’s melancholic piano figures, and resists doing much else. The effect is something like a broken two-way radio and a toy piano playing a duet in an empty stadium. Notes don’t end as much as they float into space, while Nicolai’s own drawling tones just hover, changing imperceptibly over five or ten minutes. There are contours that can barely be distinguished, walls and windows built from timbre and resonance rather than steel and glass. The structure exists for thirty or forty minutes, then Nicolai turns off the computers and the walls vanish.