SIGNAL
Robotron
Raster Noton
MP3 Release //
£5.99
ALVA NOTO
unitxt
Raster Noton
MP3 Release //
£6.99
GAS
Nah Und Fern
Kompakt
4CD //
£21.99
ALVA NOTO
Xerrox Vol.1
Raster Noton
CD //
£12.99
OUT OF STOCK
Modern music has always had a tendency towards a mimicry of its environment. Whether it be Delius reappropriating birdsong for his woodwind arrangement of On Hearing The First Cuckoo Of Spring, or Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten adopting the mechanised sounds of industry, musicians have always been compelled to emulate, or at least incorporate their surroundings, whether cultural or natural, into their art. In the datastream of the 21st century the Chemnitz-based label Raster Noton stands out above all others as an interpreter and re-interpreter of the digital age. The label tends to get branded with that most continually devalued of terms ‘minimalist’ for its perceived aesthetic of boldly elemental sonic building blocks – from which so many of the imprint’s defining releases have been constituted: the sine wave and the noise signal (white or otherwise), and yet there’s something unmistakably familiar about these sounds; this is a language our everyday lives are already constructed from. While their late 20th century forebears applied the aesthetics of processes and mechanisms from manufacturing and industry to their craft, so many of the Raster Noton label’s publications emulate the unseen operations and transactions of our era – the flow of information.
This May 30th, Raster Noton celebrates its 12th anniversary with a concert at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, where its three founding fathers, Frank Bretschneider, Olaf Bender and Carsten Nicolai are set to perform both solo and collaborative sets (under the banner of Signal), with support from Kangding Ray and DJ sets from .snd. The ICA event comes at an uncommonly productive time in the label’s history, with new releases by Alva Noto, Byetone and Gas coinciding with the event. As Carsten Nicolai points out: “ I think now is an incredibly strong period for Raster Noton releases – a very strong schedule. We aren’t really following a specific aesthetic; we’re following ourselves. We have very dedicated listeners too, a great crowd of people following us and we’re incredibly thankful for that. We’re taking them and ourselves on a trip. For instance the Byetone EP…”
Any notions of the label being governed by an austere, conceptual impetus were challenged by the Plastic Star EP by Olaf Bender’s Byetone project. The release marked Raster Noton’s most overt foray into the field of techno, partially thanks to the remixing presence of Sleeparchive, and of course the 12” format itself – not a platform you’d traditionally associate with the digital precision that tends to characterise the label. Bender himself cites the advent of techno as “an essential experience” for him, and Bretschneider is similarly quick to point out the significance of more dance-oriented electronic music on the early days of the label, specifically “British labels like Plant Mu and Warp of course, but really not so many German labels. British electronica had more of an influence on us than German electronic labels. I listened to IDM in the nineties, and that was a really big influence at the time. The first Rastermusik releases had a lot of that dance/electronic music influence.”
Bender and Bretschneider started the Rastermusik label in 1996 as a means of releasing their own music. Bretschneider explains: “At first we looked for a label to get it released on, but it just wasn’t happening. At the time, Olaf worked for a big distributor in Germany so it seemed easy to set up our own label.” In 1999, Carsten Nicolai got involved, and merged his own label with Rastermusik, resulting in Raster Noton as we now know it.
Olaf Bender describes the climate of creativity offered by their former East German home, Chemnitz in those early years: “There was a lot of technology around. The first CD burners came out, music was being more and more computerised and there came a time when it felt right to take control of all this ourselves. Frank and I started the label in our hometown and Carsten lived there too.” Soon, the label started to make connections far beyond its place of birth: “While Frank and I were much more locally focussed, Carsten was travelling a lot, and then the internet started becoming more and more important. After a while we felt we were becoming part of a network. We felt especially close to Touch and Mego – communication was easy. It was a new situation for us, although it was harder than before. We started [Raster Noton] as our own platform and then things just opened up.”
It was clear from the label’s inception that a conventional management policy wouldn’t apply. As Bender puts it: “We are artists first, so we run the label like a gallery. The artists promote themselves and we try to be a family. It’s not especially formal; it changes. Carsten and I do a lot of the design, but there’s no real specialisation. Artistically we’re like a school in the traditions and ideals of the Bauhaus – a collective to be creative. The idea is that we’re a community and share our ambitions.”
Despite this very liberated approach to label management, since Frank Bretschneider moved away from Chemnitz for Berlin in 2000, he decided to take a step back from the running of Raster Noton. “I never wanted to run a label or be a businessman, I only ever wanted to be an artist, and now I’m quite happy just to be a musician.”
From the way the artists speak about their hometown, it seems Chemnitz offered a certain creative insularity, providing an incubative environment for the three label founders,
As Bender puts it: “Today if you’re a music freak you can follow a very narrow streak of music for years. In East Germany there was just too little information about for that to be the case.” A statement suggesting that under those circumstances you’d consume music in a different way, and perhaps be more precious, even reverent about the relative few releases that made an impact. Bretschneider too points out the difference between his old home and his current environment: ”Eight years since I’ve moved from Chemnitz to Berlin, and I can see the change. It’s a very different scene here in Berlin and slowly my tastes have changed, as have my influences. I’m quite happy to be here amongst a network of people – you meet people every week, artists, musicians…”
Raster Noton as a record label has itself moved on somewhat from its beginnings. Aside from the unexpectedly club-compatible Byetone EP, we’ve had recent work from Kangding Ray incorporating vocals and live instruments into more familiar electronic soundscapes. It seems the emphasis on conceptual motivations and experimentation for its own sake has been alleviated in recent times. The continually evolving split personality of Carsten Nicolai/Alva Noto embodies this dichotomy between the seemingly scientific approach the label has become renowned for and the more purely musical drive behind the label. On Unitxt, his latest album as Alva Noto, these two threads cross. After a first half of rhythmic, beat driven structures the album shifts into what appears to be less familiar territory. The second half is an exercise in resynthesizing the familiar, translating various software applications like the Microsoft Office package into audio, revealing a confoundingly complex, seemingly chaotic music based on the most fundamental and basic of sound waves in disorientating states of flux.
Nicolai, like labelmate Ryoji Ikeda has a preoccupation with the transplantation and conversion of data formats, striving to bring the encoded transmissions happening all around us all the time into the tangible realm, resynthesizing and reintroducing us to the auditory topography of our age.
This impulse to re-format and to render the hidden world of information as something physical and concrete is a thread that can be traced beyond Nicolai’s output as Alva Noto, and back to his work as an installation artist. Telefunken was an exhibit that took an ordinary audio CD filled with simple tones and fed these frequencies and noise signals directly into a television, which reinterprets them as linear patterns onscreen. For the published release of the CD, Nicolai went under the name Noto. Nicolai clarifies the distinction between his different guises: “Initially I just used Noto, but then for my first Mille Plateaux release [Prototypes], I decided to go for a slightly different name. From there I decided to divide things: Noto is more interested in the physics of sound and the elements of sound, but not so much musical structures. Telefunken is a an inspirational type of work with its cross-platform ideas. Basically, Alva Noto is a specific project that’s more interested in a musical approach to sound. In the collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Opto and even Transform, there’s this idea of transforming sound into more musical contexts.”
Another of Nicolai’s projects, Xerrox, manages to find a meeting point between melody and the systematic transformation of mundane, everyday sounds. Starting with source recordings lifted from advertising jingles, telephone hold music and public spaces, Nicolai scours for something musical beneath the surface. According to the artist himself, this previously undocumented appetite for melody came about as a result of recording and touring with Ryuichi Sakamoto.
“The idea was always to open up another door in the room. It was never supposed to be a new direction, but was intended as a second field. I’ll continue with this approach, and I’m working on [a follow up] already – I’d like to have it ready for autumn.” This doesn’t mean an end to his more established sound, however: “While working on Xerrox I got interested in working with loops again – thinking about what was coming next. That led to this rhythmic album [Unitxt]. So I’m really running on two different tracks now. One is this non-beat Xerrox direction, and the other is, let’s say, the more typical Alva Noto syncopated beat stuff.”
On the subject of this fragmented working method, Nicolai points out: “I don’t categorise what I’m doing. I don’t have this problem working out where I’m going to put something. For me it doesn’t all have to be together in one operation. The label itself feels like a very natural crossing over point between design, information and sound. I’m happy with fragmentation. One of my working strategies is working with polarities. With my works I’m super logical and organised up to a point, but then I try and incorporate errors and mistakes.”
It seems at odds with the seemingly pristine hyper-organised sound world he tends to occupy that errors, mistakes or anything that might be deemed ‘random’ seep into Nicolai’s work, but looking to artworks like snow.noise (based on the synthesis of snowflake crystals) and the out of phase looping narratives of noto.infinity (Nicolai’s four-turntable locked groove installation) you can identify a fascination with uncertainty, mutation and indeterminate, or aleatory narratives.
It’s easy to identify Nicolai as being the experimental epicentre of the label, and of the three main players, he’s certainly the one who still seems to have a foot in conceptual music. Bretschneider is keen to point out, however, that in the earliest days of Raster Noton there was a far greater consciousness of being exploratory and idea-driven. The label’s award winning 20’ to 2000 series of releases was an early success, themed around the notion of each participating artist contributing their own manifesto of what music in the 21st century should sound like. One twenty-minute EP was released per month, leading up to the new millennium. It seems in these days thinking in this thematic, experimental way was treated as an obligation: “We did a lot of experimental stuff in the early years – we had to do it, because we needed to explore possibilities offered by computers, for instance. In the nineties it was quite new to make music exclusively on computers, but now I feel things have changed and moved away from ‘exploring’. For me, and I guess this is true for Carsten as well, it’s just about doing music. I still call myself a musician, not a scientist. I’m really interested in music, and the idea of exploring all these experimental things like the really high sine frequencies, it’s still there, and we deal in those sorts of sounds, but the main goal now is to make music, so that’s possibly a change from the early days.”
An artist affiliated with the label in these early days (and a contributor to 20’ to 2000), was Wolfgang Voigt, who now returns to the label with a book and CD harbouring unreleased images and music from his Gas project. Olaf Bender is clearly thrilled at the prospect of Voigt appearing on the label again after all these years: “On my first visit to Cologne I saw Mike Ink – he was a hero of mine.” On the subject of Voigt, Nicolai elaborates: “We’ve been friends for a long time. I was running this club many years ago and we had this Raster Noton/Kompakt night years ago, maybe in ’98. We had a kind of relation in that many of us shared an interest in this kind of straight beat techno – although in many ways, [Voigt] never did that. He loved all the Studio One stuff too – there were many connection points, but sometimes you have to wait for the artist. We’ve been talking about [the Gas release] since 1999, and since Kompakt decided to re-release all the Gas stuff Wolfgang was very interested in putting out this book and CD, and he decided to pull out all this unreleased material, essentially the earliest recorded material under the project name of Gas. It’s been a long conversation, but now finally we’re doing it.”
Some of Raster Noton’s finest works have come from long-term associates – the likes William Basinski and Robert Lippok: “Most of the people whose music we release are really close friends, and it sometimes takes us a long time to actually get around to releasing something by them.” Says Nicolai. “For instance, Robert Lippok: we asked him for that record seven years before he actually gave us the master. We work very closely like that with all our artists. It’s not too much like a business here. The label is more like a creative platform where we can release ideas, and share ideas.”
As Bender puts it: “It’s important to be in a label that doesn’t just release stuff that’s their own sound. Each release tries to be a statement. Basinski started very early with this tape looping, and his music hadn’t been published before. He was a friend of Carsten’s and we really respected his work, so it was a pleasure for us to release it.” Nicolai confirms that this creative dialog between Basinski and the label started out as friendship rather than a working relationship: “I lived in New York for a while and I lived in a house with Billy. He was an incredibly close friend of mine, and them we became the label that introduced him, with Shortwavemusic. With that drone sound he was this super-melancholic maximalist more than we are the minimalists. I always loved his stuff but it actually took me a couple of years to understand that he’d fit the label perfectly. Later, he established his own label, and now we’re incredibly happy to see him doing so well.”
Although in reality the label’s release roster has been characterised by genuine creative diversity over these twelve years, Raster Noton’s label brand is still inexorably linked to the work published by its three founders. In addition to the new albums from Alva Noto and Byetone, Bretschneider too is preparing material for a number of projects: “At the moment we’re preparing a DVD of some more experimental stuff I did called Rhythm EXP, and at the moment I’m working with Sakana Hasomi (previously known for his work as Neina on Mille Plateaux), but that’s in its early stages. He’s doing this really beautiful, melodic, abstract music and I do my rhythmic stuff, I hope we can combine those two sides to make something new.” You can hear the early results of this collaboration for yourselves via our preview of the duo’s forthcoming album on Spekk.
