Description
Boomkat: “In an emotionally lush 5th volume, Carsten Nicolai completes the acclaimed Xerrox series of conceptual image-to-sound recordings with a romantic, richly melodic finale that epitomises his solo work’s clinamen from coldly mechanical and nanoscopic to warmer, widescreen themes since initiating the series in 2005 – RIYL Gas, Lawrence English, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Biosphere, Michael Nyman.
During the mid-late ‘90s and thru the turn of the millennium, Carsten Nicolai’s Alva Noto was a major proponent of minimalist music that harnessed glitches – ostensibly unwanted parts of electronic recording processes – to austere and precise, if beautiful, ends, both solo, and in collaboration with pianist composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, as well as Mika Vainio and others. As that project pushed the concept to a creative cul-de-sac, from 2005/06 Carsten Nicolai continued to evolve his music into more spacious, vaporous designs that swept across the frequency spectrum in swooning, avant and ambient neo-classical adjacent zones without losing sight of his fine sculpted minimalism and conceptual processes.
After four preceding instalments, Nicolai would take longer than usual to record ‘Xerrox Vol. 5’, eschewing samples in favour of original melody and emphasising a sense of evocative pathos that really came to fruition in his landmark 2015 film score for ‘The Revenant’, co-written with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Also arriving some 30 years since he made the decisive switch from architecture and landscape design to the more open-ended metaphoric realms of music, it really feels as though all Nicolai’s circles bleed into this gesamtkunstwerk-like opus, which distills, refines and opens out all his ideas across 80 minutes of exquisitely chiselled details within macro structures, and most importantly suffused with a reserved but chest swelling sentimental melodic and harmonic pathos that has increasingly come to define his work, somewhat similar to John Cage’s ultimate harmonic conclusions in his later years”.
Noton – 2024
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