[From the Ithaca Times] After a lifetime of listening and thinking about music, it can be difficult to encounter sounds that are truly foreign and new. Yet last Wednesday, June 3, an audience emerged from the Red House Arts Center, a nonprofit cultural center in Syracuse, in a state of shock and overload. Carsten Nicolai, performing as Alva Noto, and Olaf Bender, as Byetone, presented two hours of overwhelming, propulsive beauty and impressive musical and visual innovation. The ease and poise with which Nicolai and Bender executed their minimal, post-industrial glitch-electronic vision was, quite frequently, breathtaking.
As co-founders of the German electronic music record label Raster-Noton (along with Frank Bretschneider, the label is the product of a fusion of separate labels Rastermusik and Noton), the duo encapsulates an attitude towards music that is extremely thorough in its minimalist aesthetic; each release pays equal attention to elements of design, packaging, theory, text, video and sound.
The impetus to found Raster-Noton in 1996 grew out of a noticeable lack in the world for what they wanted to pursue, and since then, the label has remained at the vanguard of electronic music. “The main reason we started the label was that there was nobody else that was interested in what we wanted to do,” Nicolai said in an interview after the performance. “We are artists and musicians that are interested in very specifically combining visuals with sound. There are a few other labels around like that now, but there was no one like that then.”
Raster-Noton took a holistic approach right from the start. “Back then, it was impossible to have full control,” Bender recalled. “We wanted to do our own graphic design, our own visuals, our own music.”
At first, Raster-Noton pushed an overtly experimental, highly conceptual aesthetic. Although they remain rigorously avant-garde in sensibility, the label has also incorporated everything from club dance music to contemporary pop. Over the past 15 years, Raster-Noton has released records from William Basinski, Coil, Wolfgang Voigt, Kim Cascone, Ryoji Ikeda, and many others.
“We were very interested in pure digital sounds and processes,” Bender said. “Over time, we did a lot of live performance. We wanted the music to be, in its own way, enjoyable as well as innovative. Our [record label] concept is very crossover oriented — the crossover between art and music. Between conceptual and club. Those are the points that are interesting to us.”
At Wednesday’s performance, both Alva Noto and Byetone employed their trademark visuals — projected on a large screen behind them — that enhanced and complemented the music. “We are living in a digital culture, but when we started out it was still in transition,” Bender said. “My first band was mostly analog, but even then, we were combining instruments with synthesizers in a multimedia approach. And for us, it was the perfect machine, the computer, because it is pure digital data. So it was like, why not make your own visuals? Now, it is very normal to see others doing it, but when we started it was very unusual.”
While Nicolai focused on the spiraling and contortions of severe geometric shapes, Bender’s visuals were slightly less austere, using numbers counting from zero to upwards of 1,000. (During “Plastic Star,” the lead single from his album Death of a Typographer, the numbers clicked up in rhythm with the bass, to tense and chilling effect.) “My visuals are about light; I’m much more interested in using visuals to get you in the mood. It’s not about storytelling. It’s much more about creating atmosphere,” explained Bender.
“There is a long German tradition of avant garde film from the 1920s, that sees what you can do with visuals without any specific objects. It’s very abstract, and I try to continue this tradition. Carsten is much more of a fine artist, so he looks more for a specific color or a specific resolution. In a way, our ideas are very connected, but we are also totally different.”
Nicolai, an accomplished visual and sound installation artist and microsound designer, has collaborated with the likes of Ryoji Ikeda, Michael Nyman and Ryuichi Sakamoto. At Wednesday’s Red House performance, Nicolai mined a wealth of sounds and textures over the course of his 30-minute long set. He placed painstaking focus on detail and precision; both worked through their sets with refinement, intensity and extraordinary poise.
The audience responded well both to straight-ahead beats and rhythms as well as the spikier, glitchier abstractions; towards the end of the Byetone set, a good number of patrons stood up to dance.
“We really take live performance as being live,” Nicolai stressed. “We’re always testing and trying out new things, playing sounds that we’ve never recorded before. For us, live performance is an opportunity to try things out, and we share that with the audience. You can’t expect to hear what is on the album; when you hear us, you’re hearing, perhaps, part of a new album that is coming up next year.”
Bender agreed. “As a computer-based musician, live performance is the only way to get feedback. It’s not like being in a band. There’s no interaction. Maybe you conceive something at home, but to go in public and perform it? That is the real moment,” Bender said. “I have always felt more focused in a live presentation, and maybe that will lead to a record in the end. But I cannot just sit in my chair at home and think about a record. I need a way, an audience, a feeling, a reaction.”
For Bender, live performance emphasizes the communal and social aspects of music culture. “We don’t live on an island, and we need the feedback,” he said. “For me, music is, in a lot of ways, a social thing. I need the interaction between the musician and the audience.” A major part of the Raster-Noton philosophy stems from their uncompromising ideals and refusal to concede to an audience that is looking for simple access. “While I’m looking for energy — because you can feel it in the room — even if it’s a harsh [energy], that’s a reaction, too. The most stupid thing you can do today is if you present something that is… too easy to consume,” Bender said.
Having just played to thousands of people at the acclaimed electronic music festival MUTEK in Montreal only a few days prior — the duo’s Syracuse performance was part of an exclusive and brief four-city North American tour — it was hard not to feel lucky at the incredible intimacy of the Red House environs.
The two played expertly off of each other — Bender’s buoyant, industrial-flecked techno was a jubilant response to Nicolai’s more severe, glitchy microsounds — which culminated in a 15-minute, trance-inducing encore in which they worked together under their collaborative name Diamond Version. The encore set was a seamless amalgamation of Nicolai’s bodily concerns with movement and beat patterns and Bender’s wonderfully austere and esoteric sensibilities.
The Red House theater was well suited for the concert, and while the sets, perhaps disappointingly, never reached the point of overwhelming loudness (although the venue did hand out free earplugs; a nice touch), the relative quietness of the set allowed for subtle complexities to emerge (a friend pointed out that the music was much less bass-heavy than it was at MUTEK just a few days prior).
Their set-up was minimal and the compositions were presented, for the most part, on the fly. “At the moment, our live set up is very digital. We try to optimize its use so that it’s convenient for both us and the venues, and that we can be super flexible and do changes on the fly,” Nicolai said. “This way we are able to run visuals at the same time as the audio, and it’s all produced in real time. There is nothing that is prerecorded.”
Both Nicolai and Bender — and the Raster-Noton aesthetic as a whole — represent an unusual intersection of abstract, avant experimentation with beat-oriented dance traditions. These days, it’s not rare to find fine examples in either genre, but to see both integrated in a way that feels truly new — interacting, embracing and dovetailing — was a real thrill. “We grew up in East Germany, so we never had a chance to think that it wasn’t normal to be doing everything ourselves,” says Bender. “And today, I really enjoy the freedom that we can make records as radical as we want. We are free to do entirely what we like.”
Reflecting upon the history and future of electronic music of the past 100 years, it’s hard not to imagine Raster-Noton occupying a significant spot on the continuum. “We have had radical views right from the start,” Nicolai said.