Heartcrushingly Beautiful: Favorite Albums 2023 – PART 2

I’ve followed Alva Noto (Carsten Nikolai) since I was around 13-14 years old – the first record I heard was his collaboration with Sakamoto, “Insen”, this was an absolutely mindblowing introduction to microsound ambient for me – and I’m always eager of anticipation when he releases a new album, especially his non-soundtrack records. Alva Noto is one of the great artists of the twenty-first-century, in music and beyond, always remaining curious, engaging in collaborative projects with equally gifted composers and releasing one great album after another. This work is made in response to Richard Siegal’s 2021 dance performance ‘ECTOPIA’.

There’s a rare depth and precision in his work, an artistic integrity, knowledge and confidence seldom seen, a true master of his craft. It’s evident when listening to Nikolai’s work that he studied architecture and landscape design before pursuing the arts, and that he also works as an visual artist. Truly an architect of sound, Nikolai is designing and building digital audio landscapes with a three-dimensional spatial quality (the dimension of depth rather than just horizontal between left and right). Today, he holds a well-earned professorship in art with focus on digital and time-based media.

Among the likes of Ikeda and Byetone – while drawing inspiration from Chain Reaction ambient dub – Noto works with glitchy metallic percussive elements, spacious chord pads, and immersive soundscapes in a repetitive, minimalistic climate, at times perhaps almost reminiscent of the Soviet DDR-buildings he grew up among in the DDR. If you listen attentively, what may, on the surface, sound like cold, non-emotional, almost non-human music, always reveals a strong emotional core. It’s akin to listening to an emotional language that is precisely not our own, appearing alien, new, and foreign, genuinely futuristic, and yet we somehow recognize ourselves in this “other”.