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Alva Noto

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Alva Noto is the musical name of Carsten Nicolai, a German artist and label owner, born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, in the GDR. He studied landscape architecture in Dresden and, as an independent visual artist, exhibited at a time when private galleries did not exist in the GDR. After the fall of the Wall he co-founded the cultural centre VOXXX in Chemnitz. In 1994 he started the label noton, which merged with RasterMusic in 1999 to form Raster-Noton.

Music and breakthrough

Raster-Noton became an important German platform for experimental electronic music. Nicolai was responsible there for the CD series 20 to 2000, which won the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2000. His music as Alva Noto is reductive and connected with his visual work, with signs, acoustics and visual structures. His albums include Prototypes from 2000, Transform from 2001, the Xerrox series and unitxt from 2008. He worked with Ryōji Ikeda, Blixa Bargeld, Michael Nyman and Iggy Pop, and above all with Ryūichi Sakamoto.

Influence

In 2009 he wrote the opera Sparkie: Cage and Beyond with Nyman. In 2015 he made the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant together with Sakamoto, which was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, among others. He showed how electronic music can sound almost like visual art, and took his work to museums such as Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to a piece from the Xerrox series and notice how small electronic sounds and rhythms form a tight, almost bare structure.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

See also

Categories: Artists