Carsten Nicolai - NOTO

The German artist/musician Carsten Nicolai uses electronic sound and visual art as a kind of hybrid- tool to create his own microscopic view of creative processes. His world looks more like a laboratory, constantly morphing in space and time, influenced by the impulses of this media world. Sound, the message as code, becomes the primary theme via visualized sound performance.

The realtime calculated and manipulated sounds shift into a digital image by modules changing the sampling rate and the bit rate of the performed sounds. The sound dissolves in single traps of digital sound. It creates pattern of clicks and cutup of sine-wave frequencies. The image resembles one of steaming informations and codified images. A visual translation into code-patterns reacting in realtime to the live constructed sound-files is a substantial part of the performance.

“The German electronic-music composer Carsten Nicolai-known as Noto- makes you think about the future of music, and when he performed his work, it was easy to feel that he was part of a much larger societal movement.
[...]
Nicolai is putting his energies toward something that isn't music in the traditional sense. He is a sound-researcher looking for new palettes, and he has only a slight aptitude in regard to form. For better or for worse, his work can sound like speculation-in the gold-mining sense-more than composition.
[...]
Nicolai samples the sounds of electronic information transmission-fax tones, modem sounds, telephone pops and clicks-and organizes them into loops, to which he adds longer electronic tones in the background and foreground as the piece progresses.”
(The New York Times, 1.29.99)

“The soundworks of Carsten Nicolai confront the viewer - and listener - with the dichotomy between electricity and electronics hinted at by Virilio. Electronics come prepacked; they harness the raw natural power of electricity by converting it from direct to alternating current; compress it ready for extrusion through microchips installed within miniaturised components. Electronics readies electricity for the marketplace, and commodifies its power through ever proliferating infinities of electronic goods. The marketplace channels productiontowards standardization, and this is as applicable to washin.....In the absence of comforting reference points such as repetitive rhythms or vocals, these sounds drift between the speakers, or between earphones, like sonic Rorschach blots.”

(Text by Ben Ratliff and Rob Young, The Wire magazine)