ALVA NOTO
Calling Carsten Nicolai a.k.a. Alva Noto a musician would be a major understatement. Yes, he produces music and has releases on his own, I dare say the most experimental and boundary-pushing record label of Germany – Raster-Noton. However, his investigations into sound frequencies, the structure of sound and its possibilities for being visualized or turned into a material form make him so much more than just a musician. Alva Noto revolves in the crossover area of transition between science, media, visual art and sound – the area that is barely explored, thus, mysterious and fascinating for many minds. Alva Noto shares his profound thoughts on seeing sound and hearing image…
interview by Katya Guseva
In your work you enter the space where the sound and the image meet. At that moment do you feel the two are in an equal interaction? Is it a way to enhance the audio experience by introducing the visuals or vice versa? In other words are you trying to hear the light or see the sound?
Ok, let me elaborate a bit. As I started experimenting with sound, on the very basic level of sine waves, I was very interested in perception of sound, especially in the very high and the very low frequencies. And I needed a visual control, I needed an oscilloscope to see the sound or to know that the sound is really there. So I was always looking for ways to visualize low and high frequencies, or even to have
a visual control over them. Overall, that is what I’m working on.
From a very early stage, image and sound, were very close together for me. Yet I’m not the kind of person who immediately visualizes sound, I’m rather a person who is more interested to find ways how sound can be visualized. I mean you have to imagine human hearing has a span, let’s say a common idea of 20 hz to 20,000 hz, but other animals are hearing different frequencies, ranges. But sound doesn’t stop on these frequencies. The definition of sound is much wider than what we hear.
So I was really interested in these outside portals – how we perceive, how it physically affects us. Sound that is very high or very low, that we might not hear, we can perceive on other levels – with our bodies.
I’m really interested in this experimentation and still today I use this principle in my live performances. I still use graphical analyzers to visualize the sound, to perform the sound on stage. I really feel like the visuals are performing the sound for me.
What about Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music attracted you to collaborate with him? And will we be seeing more of collaborations with Sakamoto in the future?
The collaborations with Sakamoto created a really beautiful symbiosis of acoustic sound and pure electronic sound and we both really enjoyed this collaboration and we both had a feeling that it creates something that a single person couldn’t do. I think this is the main driving force behind the collaboration between Ryuichi and myself – that we create something that we both can not do separately. I think this is, in general, the goal of collaboration. Our two collaborative albums are really outstanding in trying to define new areas of acoustic instruments like a piano with a pure sine wave. These records are not only purely experimental but they also created a certain beauty. I mean, it’s very difficult to talk about beauty, but when you listen to this music, you have a feeling that can only be described as beautiful. We have done, so far, four collaborations, and planning to have a fifth one, that will maybe be the last one, and then the circle is closed. Because it would communicate a unified concept all together. I guess we will start working on it next year and the idea is to do another tour next year as well.
