RhoDeo 2116 Sundaze

Hello, looks like Carsten Nicolai is rather popular here, excellent., reason enough to post more work by him aand his friends these weeks.


Carsten Nicolai (18 September 1965), also known as Alva Noto, is a German musician and visual artist. He is a member of the music groups Diamond Version with Olaf Bender (Byetone), Signal with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender, Cyclo with Ryoji Ikeda, ANBB with Blixa Bargeld, ALPHABET with Anne-James Chaton. Opto with Thomas Knak, and Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto with whom he composed the score for the 2015 film The Revenant.




Carsten Nicolai, born 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, is a German artist and musician based in Berlin. He is part of an artist generation who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art and science. In his work he seeks to overcome the separation of the sensory perceptions of man by making scientific phenomenons like sound and light frequencies perceivable for both eyes and ears. Influenced by scientific reference systems, Nicolai often engages mathematic patterns such as grids and codes, as well as error, random and self-organizing structures. His installations have a minimalistic aesthetic that by its elegance and consistency is highly intriguing. After his participation in important international exhibitions like documenta X and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale, Nicolai’s works were shown worldwide in extensive solo and group exhibitions.

His artistic œuvre echoes in his work as a musician. For his musical outputs he uses the pseudonym Alva Noto. With a strong adherence to reductionism he leads his sound experiments into the field of electronic music creating his own code of signs, acoustics and visual symbols. Together with Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider he is co-founder of the label 'raster-noton. archiv für ton und nichtton'. Diverse musical projects include remarkable collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ryoji Ikeda (cyclo.), Blixa Bargeld or Mika Vainio. Nicolai toured extensively as Alva Noto through Europe, Asia, South America and the US. Among others, he performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London. Most recently Nicolai scored the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest film, 'The Revenant' which has been nominated for a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Critics Choice Award.

biography
lives and works in Berlin and Chemnitz, Germany
1965    born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, GDR
1985-90    Study of landscape architecture. Dresden, Germany
1992    Co-founder of the project Voxxx-Kultur- und Kommunikationszentrum, Chemnitz, Germany
1994    Foundation of noton.archiv für ton und nichtton
1999    Label fusion to raster-noton
2015    Professorship in art with focus on digital and time-based media, Dresden Academy of Fine Arts
Prizes / Scholarships
2014    17th Japan Media Arts Festival, Grand Prize (Art Division), Japan (crt mgn installation)
2012    Giga-Hertz-Award, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (cyclo. id publication with ryoji ikeda)
2007    Villa Massimo, Rome, Italy
     Zurich Prize, Zurich, Switzerland
2003    Villa Aurora, Los Angeles, USA
2001    prize ars electronica, golden nica, Linz, Austria (polar installation with marko peljhan)
2000    f6-philip morris, graphic prize, Dresden, Germany
     prize ars electronica, golden nica, Linz, Austria (20' to 2000 project)
1990    Jürgen Ponto prize, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Artworks in Public Space
2015    chroma actor, Seibu Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
2011    lfo spectrum, Olympic Park, London, UK
2010    monitor, Siobhan Davies Studios, London, UK
     autor, Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany (temporary)
2009    poly stella, Kasumigaseki Building Plaza, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
     pionier ll, Piazza Plebiscito, Naples, Italy (temporary)
2006    polylit, Kleiner Schlossplatz, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany
2005    frequenz (milch), Tramhaltestelle, Hauptbahnhof Leipzig, Germany


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Those of you who heard the Alva Noto remix of Bjork's 'Innocence' have already been given a preview of the rhythmic processes behind Unitxt, which aesthetically follows along similar lines to the Trans series of releases. Recorded over the past couple of years, this album's inception came about during the Raster Noton tour of Japan between 2006 and 2007, only to be finally revised and edited into its current form within recent months. Of all the rhythm-based music by Alva Noto, this latest batch probably marks the greatest levels of detail and elaboration. If an album like Transform was largely characterised by a strict and pristine approach to minimalism and subtlety, Unitxt presents a more complex and full-blooded exercise. The essential building blocks of the Alva Noto sound remain pared down and elemental, but there's something uncommonly visceral about Nicolai's compositional technique this time around, which while still familiar and unmistakably his work, sounds charged with renewed levels of ferocity and kinetic energy. Surprisingly, this album isn't entirely impervious to human interventions, and Poet Anne-James Chaton appears on eight-minute opening track 'U_07', offering a portrait of Carsten Nicolai in numbers and text, reading out the various pieces of information found in Nicolai's wallet, from invoices, business cards, notes and even credit card information. This theme of spoken numeric information is continued on 'U_08-1', in which Chaton recites a series of digits corresponding to the 'Golden Ratio', which conceptually is all very much in keeping with the kind of geometric-acoustic perfection suggested by Noto's intensely organised soundworld. The album is divided into two distinct sections: after an initial sequence of ten conventional recordings, the remaining sixteen audio tracks are occupied by various kinds of data having been converted into audio information, with software applications like Excel, Word and Powerpoint all reinterpreted as a raw stream of sound matter. The end result is surprisingly beautiful, and very much akin to the kind of radical, uncompromising digital experiments of Farmers Manual. There's a certain logical elegance to the fact that these sound files - sourced from programs you'd use everyday in an office - actually sound rather like the various mechanisms of technology you might have encountered over the years, from the rhythmic splutter of printers to the loading sounds of old 8 bit computers. When it's presented to you in this context, you really appreciate how chaotic, alien and how absolutely beautiful this continuous bombardment of data can be. Coupled with the recent Ryoji Ikeda Test Pattern CD, Unitxt presents a hugely absorbing perspective on our relationship with the information that's all around us, all the time. An amazing album - Hugely recommended.



<a href="https://mir.cr/VLBATAA3">    Alva Noto - Unitxt  </a> ( flac 351mb)

Unitxt   
01 U_07    7:57
02 U_06    2:07
03 U_04    5:15
04 U_09-1-2    4:48
05 U_08-1    3:13
06 U_03    4:30
07 U_08    5:37
08 U_01-2-0    4:00
09 U_05    3:20
10 U_09-0    3:53
11 (no audio)    3:00
Unitxt Code (Data To Aiff)   
12 60308_47    0:13
13 838TP7cdp    0:04
14 Enigma4.0    0:05
15 Fontlab4.0    0:51
16 Hyperengine    0:10
17 Entourage    0:54
18 Excel    1:07
19 Powerpoint    0:45
20 Word    1:41
21 Monitortest    0:06
22 Morse    0:08
23 Prototype6_isdn    0:08
24 Serialbox    0:29
25 Soundmaker    0:07
26 Spray16x9s    1:07

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Mimikry is the first full-length to emerge from the collaboration between sound and visual artist Alva Noto, a.k.a. Carsten Nicolai, and composer, voice-artist, and former Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds/Einsturzende Neubaten alumnus Blixa Bargeld. For three years they’ve focused on live performance, stressing improvisation in situ, with 2010 seeing the release of an EP, Ret Marut Handshake.

Here, they again break the silence with opener “Fall,” beginning with a thin, strangled whine, animal and pained. It does what its title says, descending into a choral caterwaul reminiscent of Mike Patton’s hotel-room multitrack suggestion “Inconsolable Widows In Search of Distraction,” from his Adult Themes For Voice.

The sound builds and terrifies. It’s exactly the kind of sound you’d make if you were asked to imitate a trapped cat, at that kind of party. It’s the kind of sound I imagine the feline-mantis-lifeform on the album’s cover would make, cocking her head slightly, beguilingly, before biting yours off. It is an example of the sound that emerges from the versatile glottis of Bargeld, a set of syllables beyond sense that, on opening and noticing, are found wormed throughout the leaves of the collection.

Nicolai, renowned for his work in cymatics, the visualization of sound, and compositions that stress duration and delicately held sheets of crystalline texture, matches Bargeld’s echoed, layered, quietly genocidal soundswell with his own ominous clarion. The sound of massively pressurized gas escaping through a pinprick. Just when the combined, oddly harmonious, and well-spatialized descending (ascending?) sound becomes overwhelmingly tactile, the gas a mylar membrane away from Hindenburg II, and the single cat reduplicated into a litter struggling in a bag halfway down an infinitely deep zero-degree Kelvin lunar seafloor vent, both parties choke back.

Far from the unrelenting side-long pummeling that we might expect from the likes of Merzbow, and despite this opening resonance, ANBB offer quite a varied sushi-set of sonic compartments. After the hackle-raising — but only two-odd-minute-long — descent of “Fall,” there are at least four or five other discernible ‘movements’ in the track’s 10 minutes. Stuttering fragments of each movement contaminate the other, Bargeld’s voice ranging from the softest whisper to strident, Carstein’s electronics moving from supercool gas to supernal warmth and back. Minimal piano lines emerge, recalling Nicolai’s (Alva Noto’s) collaborations with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto. Splinters of Nicolai’s trademark metallic and percussive microsounds needle through the layers. In all its richness and diversity, the beginning bento box indexes the remainder, the “other story, the new,” in those rare words of Bargeld’s that here don’t adhere to the form of pure, non-signifying utterance.

Industrial rears its head immediately thereafter, Nicolai tapping into the beefier sounds of his alter ego Byetone before settling back into a brilliant cover of Nilsson’s “One.” The original inspiration for the Nilsson song — a telephone’s busy signal — transfers nicely into an electronic setting, and Bargeld’s voice is a gentle, perfect balance between plaintive and playful. Clearly he respects his source even as he relishes the chance to transpose it into a setting of icy synthbergs and, yes, a small burlap sack of slow-poisoned cats corralled into a backing chorus.

Whistling LPG and veterinary nightmares wend their way again across a field of wonky time-signatures in the EBM-inflected “Ret Marut Handshake,” but are entirely anesthetized and burnt off for the restrained, razor-and-sawtooth rendition of classic US folk number “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” Over an ice-cold bed of stereo-panning, uncluttered, clipped, and percussive machine funk that wouldn’t be amiss on Autechre’s Tri Repetae, Bargeld plainsongs then snarls through the verses. The exercise has a far more disquieting tone than the cover of “One,” dispensing — as you might expect in the hands of these collaborators — with any shred of banjo-and-barndance folk jollity to expose the starkly disturbing narrative knotted into the grassroots of the song’s origins and mythology.

This sense of disquiet is amplified on the title track “Mimikry,” where Bargeld intones that “You as an insect/ Mimic yourself” alongside the kind of matter-of-fact Speak & Spell vocal sampling that littered a thousand industrial and hip-hop records of the cut & paste Ninja Tunes bent. It feels a tad trite, even as it recalls the insectoid conceit of the cover art and supposedly ‘incorporates the words’ of that same model — the model simply known as Veruschka, who has made a career of contorting herself in the name of art, most famously before the camera of David Hemmings’ photographer in Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

After a forgettable lull on the penultimate track — notable only for an alarm-clock reawakening to attention in its closing seconds, where it does indeed sound as if Merzbow or at least Alva Noto at his most caustic had been recruited — Veruschka contributes ‘vocals’ (those cat sounds!) to a great finale. “Katze” hears Veruschka and Bargeld prowl around each other in a way I can’t help but compare to Lydia Lunch and James Chance’s pre-linguistic slow burn sex & phone sax duet “Stained Sheets,” with Bargeld gently coaxing and both of them meowing, sparring, hissing, and purring as the track dissolves first into dizzy muted organ chords and increasingly bit-crushed electronic textures.

It’s an infectiously odd end to an album that is strangely unsatisfying in the best aesthetic sense, if only because such a sense provokes anticipation. Perhaps ANBB were wise to thrash out the mesh of their individual sonic peccadilloes in live-improvisation before committing them to disc. As such, it hangs together inasmuch as a dystopic ruin can. As “Katze” winds out like an exhausted dynamo, Bargeld’s last lines — “What is this? Where am I?” — are a tantalizing indication of what could — and should — be an ongoing exploration in sound by these two seasoned, well-suited experimenters and their coven of familiars.



<a href="https://multiup.org/e23266a9bf1919f38d03de30d83e8bd5">   ANBB -  Mimikry + Ret Marut Handshake  </a> ( flac 424mb)

01 Fall 10:04
02 Once Again 5:23
03 One 2:55
04 Ret Marut Handshake 6:10
05 Bernsteinzimmer (Long Version) 4:52
06 I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground (Extended) 4:02
07 Mimikry 5:02
08 Berghain 4:19
09 Wust 6:09
10 Katze 3:45
11 Electricity Is Fiction 4:16
12 Foligno 2:27
EP
13 Ret Marut Handshake 6:47
14 One     2:49
15 Electricity Is Fiction 4:15
16 Bernsteinzimmer 3:21
17 I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground 1:54
 
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A second album of dedications from Carsten Nicolai. Perhaps reflective of how varied this artist's output has become over recent years 'For 2' represents an incredibly broad range of styles and approaches, though the music always manages to retain the all-important sonic signatures unique to the Alva Noto sound. Over the past decade or so Nicolai's music has transcended the hyper-minimal rhythmic motifs that defined so much of his early work, exploring the possibilities of collaboration, live instrumentation and reconstituted orchestral ambience among other things. Accordingly, on For 2 (which collects music made between 2003 and 2008) you can expect surely the most expansive repertoire of sounds than has ever been gathered for a single Alva Noto album, something that's in-keeping with the diverse set of dedications - works for Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, fellow minimalist composer Phill Niblock, industrial designer Dieter Rams and dramatist Heiner Muller are all included, prompting greatly diverging works from Nicolai. The first piece isn't dedicated to an artist, or even a human being at all, but rather a translucent textile. This composition seems to cut itself into sections, with Noto's trademark glitching wave patterns joining with string ensemble-style chord movements and harsh, industrial sounding noise inserts. Following on is 'Villa Aurora (For Marta Feuchtwanger)', an immensely subtle field recording that captures the decay of a sustaining piano chord before it's snuffed out by the closing piano lid, leaving only the bustle of exterior environmental noises. This isn't the last time on the disc that Nicolai draws our ears to the narrative-warping potential and all-round beauty of music in decay: 'Anthem Berlin' (dedicated to Leif Elggren and Carl Michael Von Hausswolf's fictional Kingdom Of Elgaland-Vargaland) plays a similar trick, taking a sample of a militaristic marching band and spiralling the snare's sound off across several minutes of sustaining, treated resonance. There's a surprisingly strong melodic component to this selection too, with the wonderful 'Stalker (For Andrei Tarkovsky)' and two different versions of 'Argonaut (For Heiner Muller)' - one of which is arranged for live classical instrumentation - both exhibiting a keen ear for minimalist harmonic progressions. Much of this music is caught in a continual dialogue between outright beauty and more uncompromisingly conceptual, experimental pursuits. At one end of this we find the synaesthetic, Evgeny Murzin-inspired visual-to-audio synthesizer piece, 'Ans', while at the other there's the quietly heart-wrenching 'Early Winter', which samples a Phill Niblock recording - slowly and elegiacally evolving what sounds like a looped orchestral passage while sonar-blip electronics sound off in the background. A hugely impressive account of Carsten Nicolai's talents as a musician and artist, 'For 2' comes with a massive recommendation.



<a href="https://www.imagenetz.de/VKFp5"> Alva Noto - For 2 </a> ( flac 274 mb)

01 Garment (For A Garment)    6:36
02 Villa Aurora (For Marta Feuchtwanger)    1:49
03 Pax (For Chain Music)    0:54
04 Argonaut (For Heiner Müller)    7:35
05 Stalker (For Andrei Tarkovsky)    5:06
06 Sonolumi (For Camera Lucida)    4:10
07 Interim (For Dieter Rams)    2:49
08 T3 (For Dieter Rams)    7:20
09 Early Winter (For Phill Niblock)    4:29
10 Anthem Berlin (For The Kingdom Of Elgaland-Vargaland)    6:40
11 ANS (For Evgeny Murzin)    1:12
12 Argonaut-Version (For Heiner Müller 7:32

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Cyclo. is a collaborative research project by Ikeda and Nicolai which focuses on the visualisation of sound. The artists are developing a database of sounds that they are composing for the visual responses these produce when analysed in real time using equipment developed originally for phase correlation in mastering vinyl records. With such stereo image monitoring equipment, the phase and amplitude of stereo signals can be illustrated graphically. The audio elements have been constructed and chosen through agendas concerned with the minute editing of frequencies (often beyond the physical range of human hearing) and the perceptual amassing of audio elements to an undefined point. For Nicolai and Ikeda an 'infinity index’ of sound fragments is a conscious motivation forming the basis of their research and feeding cyclo. with the audio material required for visuality.

In amassing this archive, Nicolai and Ikeda transcend the usual dynamic whereby image acts merely as a functional accompaniment to sound. They arrive at a standpoint from which the audio element in the process is subservient to the desire and appetite of the image. Although this imaging is purely 2-D in display, the process proposes 3-D possibilities. Their proposition is that the structural complexities of these visual metered shapes, born and examined from the perspective of audio metering, may have in them a rich potential for architects, designers and engineers to find starting points for structural readings.




<a href="https://bayfiles.com/z2IcH5rau0/Ccl_Id_zip ">   Cyclo. - Id </a> ( flac 252mb)

01 Id#00 6:56
02 Id#01 4:09
03 Id#02 2:05
04 Id#03 2:44
05 Id#04 4:23
06 Id#05 2:03
07 Id#06 4:51
08 Id#07 3:52
09 Id#08 5:36
10 Id#09 4:09
11 Id#10 3:31


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‘Summvs’ is the fifth and purportedly final collaborative album from the dream-team of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto). Since 2002 the two musicians have fused their disciplines near-faultlessly, with Sakamoto’s evocative piano-based compositions melting effortlessly into Nicolai’s skillful digital rhythms and cautious manipulations. Each album has brought the duo slightly closer together, and ‘summvs’ (the title an amalgamation of the words summa and versus) sees their work reach critical mass. With Sakamoto apparently working on a rare piano (one of only fifteen in the world) using 16th interval tuning, and Nicolai expanding on his newfound love of harmony and melody, the results are much warmer than their earlier experiments, and all the better for it. While Nicolai’s glacial digital hiccups were always a draw for some, I found at times they distracted from the focus of the pieces – and here rather than eliminate them altogether Nicolai tempers them, working them into a more harmonic framework. The familiar bass-heavy shuffle we fell in love with all those years ago on ‘Transform’ still crops up occasionally, most noticeably on ‘Pioneer IOO’, but it's balanced by an unforgettable cinematic haze of ‘Naono’ (a clear standout – think Deaf Center, Ben Frost or The Fun Years) and ‘Halo’. There is something elegiac and deeply final about ‘summvs’, it feels like an ink stamp, an underline, a statement from the duo saying ‘this is it, and this is the best it can be’, and it truly is. Memorable, atmospheric and beautiful – even if you’ve missed all four of their previous albums, ‘summvs’ is the one to buy. Easily a highlight of 2011 thus far – you know what to do.



<a href="http://depositfiles.com/files/9ki4w4amo">  Alva Noto And Ryuichi Sakamoto - Summvs .</a> 216mb

01 Microon I 3:00
02 Reverso 6:57
03 Halo    7:10
04 Microon II 2:38
05 Pionier IOO 5:46
06 Ionoscan 4:08
07 By This River    4:08
08 Naono 11:20
09 Microon III :00
10 By This River - Phantom 8:30


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