Raster-Noton: SND, Pixel, Alva Noto, Kangding Ray
Right now I’m obsessed with the label Raster-Noton out of Chemnitz, Germany. Earlier on this year I was thoroughly addicted to Atom TM’s brilliant Liedgut record, but really there are dozens of great R-N releases from well-known electronic music maestros like , (who is one of the label’s founding partners), (who I’ve blogged about before), , and . Their stuff tends to be on the glitchy side, and in fact when I think of “glitch” as a genre (despite the bad-genre-name a la IDM) it’s really this music that comes to mind. With a trademark breathtaking graphic design and packaging style, this is innovative, boundary-pushing music even if it does tend to be a bit cold and mechanical.
SND – Atavism 2
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When I first heard I have to admit I made the immediate comparison to . Like Autechre, one gets the impression that pretty much everything these guys are creating synth-wise is done with FM synthesis, and the at times chaotic hyper-rhythmicity creates a sense of disorientation to where your mind could flip the track around in a multitude of different ways. Also both groups use algorithmic compositional methods to some extent; to explicitly program every detail of music of this complexity would be a tedious task, not to mention this kind of sound aesthetic is what generative music is all about. Where Autechre’s music evolves over all kinds of terrain, however, SND’s takes a different route whose development is more rhythmically-rooted within extremes of repetition. In other words, they throw in minute changes every 4- or 8-bar interval over something that that is otherwise completely repetitive, and in this way they are like the leftfield electronic equivalent to . Atavism is their 2009 release, and like their self-issued 4, 5, 6 from last year,each track blends seamlessly into the next so that the album flows more like one extended piece rather than a collection of individual songs, with track markers becoming a mere matter of formality and convenience. Overall, the album is an experience of extremely synthetic, rhythmic-chaos-inducing pure bliss.
Pixel – +40° 42 24.12 -73° 59 51.82
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I’m new to , having just discovered his newest release The Drive, which to make an understatement has completely blown me away. Though R-N hypes up the fact that he is a former jazz saxophonist, I think that’s more or less irrelevant when it comes to the music, and I tend not to be so impressed by that kind of statement generally because I don’t think it has much to do with the finished product. Anyhow, not to downplay this amazing album; The Drive is made up of very nice drone which tends toward the noisier side, some occasional guitar and very clicky IDM-style beats. The song featured here is my favorite because of that menacing guitar figure and the hissy bass notes that are oh so heavy. Although ambient might be the easiest term with which to describe a sound like this, it’s not really all that ambient in a traditional sense. Within the last ten or fifteen years music that might be otherwise considered ambient has been exploring all kinds of territory which is very exciting, and sharing certain things in common with guys like or , Pixel is a great example of that.
Alva Noto – Phaser Acat 1
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I had become accustomed to Noto’s albums like Transform and Prototypes and even Unitxt where he goes for that extremely stripped-down sound, using nothing much beyond a sine wave, bits of white noise and lots of clicks and electronic malfunction sounds. To be honest I really wasn’t into the second half of Unitxt where he converted the data files from Microsoft programs such as Word, Entourage, Explorer and so on, into sound – in my opinion, definitely makes for a far better concept than the resulting music. So when with Xerrox Vol. 2 he drops what is more or less an ambient/drone record I was extremely surprised and very pleasantly so. Beautiful sound sculptures throughout, bathed in layers of hiss, waveshaping and other types of electronic noise make this a gem of a record and yet another great release in the R-N catalog for 2009.
Kangding Ray – World Within Words
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I got this album and Moodgadget’s Synchronicity Suite at the same time, and when I had the two on shuffle, this song fooled me for so long into thinking it was actually by a new Moodgadget artist. Immaculately produced, it has that slick, avant-pop sensibility that the label so often tends toward. Like Pixel and guys like Ryoji Ikeda there’s a healthy dose of glitchy sounds happening throughout but in making this kind of abstract dark dance-pop music this one manages to stay pretty catchy. Good songwriting in addition to good production is always a plus, and this is a song where organic sounds and vocals are a heavy focus which is highly unusual for R-N releases.
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