Alva Noto
Electronic
The next Alva Noto concert is scheduled for Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Fira Barcelona - Gran Via in Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain. See all 1 upcoming concerts
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About Alva Noto
Hometown
Chemnitz, Germany
Born
1965
Genre
Electronic
Alva Noto is the musical alias of Carsten Nicolai, a pioneering German multimedia artist whose work lays bare the elegance of mathematics. Born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), he studied architecture and began showing in galleries in the '80s. He announced his sonic interests in 1994, founding the austerely named Noton label, subtitled “archiv für ton and nichtton”—“archive for sound and no sound.” Mikro Makro, a 1997 collaboration with Finnish iconoclast Mika Vainio, was typical of Nicolai’s conceptual approach, taking inspiration from radio-telescope recordings of pulsars and sounds sourced from body-scanning technology. Virtually all of Alva Noto’s music since then has been marked by similarly minimalistic rigor. See, for instance, the buzzing, glitching textures on the Xerrox series, launched in 2007. But not all of his work is so severe. Alongside Japanese pianist and electronic musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nicolai has recorded numerous albums of crystalline ambient grace, beginning with 2002’s Vrioon. In 2015, the duo even lent their most somber textures to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film The Revenant, pairing their skeletal pings with lush string arrangements from The National’s Bryce Dessner.
Alva Noto has also released music as a member of Opto, Cyclo, The Signal Diamond Version.
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