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Name: Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto

Nationality: German
Occupation: Sound artist, visual artist, producer, label founder at Raster Noton, co-founded with Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider
Current release: The ost recent Alva Noto album release with recent material is HYbr:ID Vol. 1. More recently, he published a cover version of David Bowie's "Subterraneans" with Martin L Gore and William Basinski.

[Read our Anne-James Chaton interview]
[Read our Frank Bretschneider interview]
[Read our William Basinski interview]


If you enjoyed this interview with Alva Noto and would like to find out more about his work, visit his official website. He is are also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.

Over the course of his career, Alva Noto has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Mika Vainio, Scanner / Robin Rimbaud, and Andy Moor. He has remixed works by, among others, Hauschka, Ludovico Einaudi, Machinefabriek, and, more recently, Joachim Spieth.

[Read our Scanner / Robin Rimbaud interview]
[Read our Andy Moor interview]
[Read our Hauschka interview]
[Read our Ludovico Einaudi interview]
[Read our Machinefabriek interview]
[Read our Joachim Spieth interview]

This Alva Noto interview was originally conducted for German print magazine beat in 2011 around the release of his univrs album.



You once emphasised that Raster Noton doesn't sell music or records so much as "ideas". Why do you think music is such a good carrier of ideas - and what kind of content can actually be communicated through it?

You really have to see it that way: It is of course an artistic position, an artistic work that is shown or presented here. What I want to express with the sentence is that we are not necessarily interested in selling a commercial product en masse, but that we are actually interested in selling an artistic position. Of course, it's also a product, but we really see it more as as a point of view.

Which of course also applies if you consider that we naturally operate in a kind of niche. It's music that is not mainstream, it's not music that is on the radio every day. It's music that requires something more in terms of prior knowledge or knowledge per se about music or visual arts or an interest around these things.

I think there is a whole variety of people who are not only primarily interested in the consumption of a pop song, but who are also interested in a process of how something like this comes about: Who is behind it, what ideas are behind it, what kind of biographies are behind it ... That's what it's really about.

Is this something you notice in your everyday work for the label?

Yes. We work with the artists on a long-term basis, we try to build series, we try to build continuities, we really try to build that up over years.

The label has been around for fifteen years, so we have built up quite a collection of releases.

The relationship between science and art seems to be a recurring theme in your work. In your view, to what extent is knowledge of materials (such as sound), processes and technologies fundamentally linked to creativity?

One of my main inspirations is nature. When you deal with nature, science is of course incredibly exciting because it shows us things or offers models to understand nature.

There is a very close connection of possibilities, music technology and creative output and a creative aesthetic that comes with it. That's always been the case. With electronic music anyway, that's quite clear, because it's strongly tied to hardware and software. That's why it's all very interesting for a musician who deals with computer music.

You once quoted Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "The world is everything that is the case." Does that mean that with new music, despite all the scepticism about its "political" or "social" meaning and relevance, you can always reshape the world to some extent?

You have to know something about the Tractatus and of course also about Wittgenstein and about the background of this quote. In principle, it means that everything that can be thought exists. Everything that is the case. Which is a very idealistic point of view, but it is of course a fantastic point of view for an artist. Because it means that everything we are capable of imagining we can also realise.

To come back to the question: You can shape the world, of course! We shape the world, we decide what the world looks like, more than ever. We are noticing more and more how strongly we emotionally determine economies and how strongly we also emotionally determine the world with our decisions. It has never been clearer that we determine the world with what we want.

This means that if we want to let economies perish and do not believe in ourselves and fall into a great depression, the economy will also fall into a depression. These are closely connected, so to speak, this psychological moment. But of course also the big political decisions, energy transition ... Fokushima is the keyword. These are global issues. So, absolutely: We are defining our future.