Alva Noto

Alva Noto is the musical alias of Carsten Nicolai, a pioneering German multimedia artist whose work lays bare the elegance of mathematics. Born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), he studied architecture and began showing in galleries in the '80s. He announced his sonic interests in 1994, founding the austerely named Noton label, subtitled “archiv für ton and nichtton”—“archive for sound and no sound”. Mikro Makro, a 1997 collaboration with Finnish iconoclast Mika Vainio, was typical of Nicolai’s conceptual approach, taking inspiration from radio-telescope recordings of pulsars and sounds sourced from body-scanning technology. Virtually all of Alva Noto’s music since then has been marked by similarly minimalistic rigour. See, for instance, the buzzing, glitching textures on the Xerrox series, launched in 2007. But not all of his work is so severe. Alongside Japanese pianist and electronic musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nicolai has recorded numerous albums of crystalline ambient grace, beginning with 2002’s Vrioon. In 2015, the duo even lent their most sombre textures to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film The Revenant, pairing their skeletal pings with lush string arrangements from The National’s Bryce Dessner.