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Alva Noto/Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Glass” (Noton, 2018)

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Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto have a fairly lengthy history of collaborations, but this is an especially fascinating (if brief) one: an improvised performance in Philip Johnson‚Äôs legendary Glass House that coincided with the opening of a Yayoi Kusama installation. A lot of the appeal unsurprisingly lies in the duo’s process, as they used the house itself as an instrument, contact mic’ing the walls and rubbing them with rubber mallets. However, Glass is also quite beautiful as a pure listening experience, striking an absorbing balance between ghostly ambiance and a crystalline and glittering rain of slow-motion glass fragments.

Nearly any good site-specific work of sound art is going to evoke a strong sense of place, particularly if the site is one as unique as The Glass House. The early moments of Glass, however, evoke something very different than a serene and pastoral masterpiece of modern architecture. Instead, it feels like I am in the subterranean depths of a vast and deserted parking garage in the middle of the night. I can hear the distant hiss of traffic, yet the most prominent sounds are disconcertingly loud and echoing drips, along with an ominous and steadily strengthening hum.

As that hum becomes louder and more layered, it feels increasingly supernatural, as if flickering phantasms are quietly emerging from the walls and shadows to encircle me. It is hard to quite put my finger on the exact moment when things change, yet my surroundings seem to seamlessly dissolve at some point into something that feels even more haunted, but more otherworldly and futuristic. It is a lot like waking up from a nightmare only to realize that I am actually in a different nightmare, like a Russian nesting doll of uncomfortable dreams. I recognize that I probably reference Tarkovsky more than is healthy, but the lion’s share of Glass feels like I have awoken in the world of Solaris and my sanity is being steadily gnawed away by escalating hallucinations and a dawning sense that my orderly, sterile surroundings are actually fluid, illusory, and potentially malevolent.

Of course, in order to experience the absorbing and creepily revelatory beauty of this album, I first had to realize that Glass is an album that necessitates extreme volume. If I listen to it casually at a normal level, it sounds like a likeable spectral drone album enlivened by an occasional flurry of crystalline processed crotales or an unexpected blurt of tormented synth. Experienced more immersively at heightened volume, however, the subtle details spring to vivid life and Glass coheres into a purposeful and haunting arc. At its best, it feels like a dazed walk through endless brightly lit corridors that eerily bend, warp, blur, flicker, and reshape themselves like they are disturbingly alive.

There is definitely an otherworldly beauty to the dreamily blurred drones and the twinkling, falling icicle-like interludes, yet there is a rising darkness and slowly dawning horror that curdles the piece into something like a grotesque caricature of an angelic choir: unnerving dissonances creep into the harmonies, drones slowly undulate like phantasmal serpents, and an occasional tormented squeal cuts viscerally through the fog. The steadily massing and darkening miasma of blurred and ghostly tones casts an absolutely beguiling spell—the role of everything else is merely to inject life, contrast, and unpredictability into its slow yet inexorable intensification. 

I am not sure how much of the piece was improvised and how much was planned in advance, but Glass feels like a very deliberate and organically building piece precisely because the central theme is so simple and perfect and all of the peripheral textural flourishes are executed with an impressive lightness of touch. Even the more cutting and structured moments feel like they are ephemerally emerging from an enchanted mist that will soon reclaim them.

The only questionable decision comes during the piece’s final third, as someone delves into something that sounds like a bleary melodica solo (I am guessing Sakamoto is the culprit, unless the supernatural power of the piece inadvertently summoned Augustus Pablo from the spirit world). While that solo gamely adheres to the piece’s floating and indistinct aesthetic, it nevertheless transforms the entire feel of the piece in a significant way. 

Pre-solo, Glass is a gorgeously eerie dreamscape ingeniously crafted from the sounds of glass. Once the solo appears, however, the illusion dissipates somewhat and the piece instead feels like a human musician improvising a melody over a particularly surreal and unconventional backdrop. Naturally, that has its appeal too (especially given the caliber of the artists involved), but it is enough to downgrade Glass from “sublime, understated masterpiece” to “a very interesting performance with flashes of genuine brilliance.” I suppose that is unfortunate, as it is always the albums that come closest to greatness that break my heart a little, but it does not change the fact that Glass is still one of the most significant and inspired works of serious sound art that I have heard this year.

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Alva Noto, “Unieqav” (Noton, 2018)

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The final installment of Carsten Nicolai’s “Uni” trilogy is a curious addition to the Alva Noto’s historically conceptual-minded and experimental discography, as it is essentially a straight techno album. Given that this comparatively dancefloor-oriented series was initially inspired by a trip to Tokyo nightclub Unit, however, I suppose a nakedly beat-driven and somewhat straight-forward album like Unieqav makes some perverse sense (especially as a culminating statement). 

There is a bit more to Unieqav than mere music though, as the album is part of a larger, more ambitious multimedia work, as Nicolai reportedly floored festival audiences with an intense video onslaught synced to his hyper-precise rhythmic salvos. As a result, Unieqav feels like a somewhat minor release compared to Nicolai’s other work when decontextualized from its intended high-volume/sensory overload presentation, but his unparalleled exactitude and clarity still make for a fine minimal techno album.

One aspect of Carsten Nicolai’s Alva Noto project that I have always appreciated is that each new album is absolutely certain to feature a very clear and coherent vision that has been executed masterfully. Obviously, perfectionism has its downsides too, but that approach lends itself quite nicely to crystalline and cerebral sound art. At worst, Nicolai’s vision occasionally errs a bit too much on the side of coldly mathematical to resonate deeply with me, yet his work is always intriguing and distinctive and it is never plagued by half-baked ideas, sloppy craftsmanship, or fits of self-indulgence. Nicolai is the kind of guy that I would probably trust to competently design a spaceship or expect to pioneer a radical new style of architecture. That is not something I would say of many other artists in the electronic/experimental milieu. 

On Unieqav, Nicolai’s clear and coherent vision is generally one of futuristic-sounding techno stripped down to just insistently repeating kick drum patterns and a host of machine-like clicks, hums, and pops. The opening “Uni Sub” is a perfectly representative statement of intent, combining a somewhat lurching rhythm with a one-note bass line, subtle mechanical sounds, and a “hook” of gurgling and sizzling noise. There are also some understated synth chords that lurk and undulate in the background, but the most compelling parts of the piece are definitely the textures.

It sounds a lot like Nicolai contact mic’d his coffee pot, processed the sounds until they were supernaturally crisp and clear, and then presented them in wonderfully magnified form. The underlying “song” is cool too, but it is essentially just a vehicle to stealthily deliver that textural sorcery, providing the necessary pulse and momentum to keep everything vibrant and purposeful. For better or worse, the remaining 11 songs are all essentially variations on that same template, with the more successful ones being those that offer the more ingenious or striking twists.

Much like drone music, minimal techno can often be formulaic and simple to a self-parodying degree, but artists who have the lightness of touch, attention to detail, and genius for subtle dynamic shifts necessary for great minimal techno are a truly rare breed indeed. Nicolai earns his place in that exclusive pantheon here, as Unieqav is a feast of sharply realized textures and masterfully manipulated rhythms, as Nicolai deftly adds and subtracts cymbals and embellishes his grooves with all manner of squelches, throbs, crackles, scrapes, and sundry other machine-like flourishes. As a result, Unieqav improbably works as both a cutting-edge dance album and a headphone experience that rewards deep-listening. That said, I do especially enjoy the occasional moments where Nicolai eases up on some of his rigorous self-constraints and expands his palette with splashes of harmony or melody.

One such piece is the eerily beautiful “Uni Mia,” as Nicolai embellishes his pummeling thump with vibrant splashes of laser-like sounds as warm synth clouds fitfully drift through the piece like passing clouds. “Uni Blue” is another more expansive piece, boasting an actual chord progression, gnarled distortion, and quasi-melodic sonar-like pings. 

To some degree it feels a bit heavy-handed and bombastic in the context of such a uniformly stark album, but that seems to be by design, as the simmering and squelching beat sounds amazing when all the synths fall away. That is quite a neat trick, as having that veil pulled away like that forced my complete focus onto Nicolai’s dazzling rhythm (it is very easy to become numb to the more inspired bits of an uncompromisingly beat-driven album unless they are ingeniously framed). Elsewhere, the closing “Uni Chord” is another highlight, as dreamily melancholy synth drones unfold over a wonderfully twitching, shivering, and stuttering beat.

As a long-time Alva Noto fan, it is quite hard to separate my opinion of Unieqav from my deeply entrenched personal expectations, as it is definitely a bit of an outlier. It is too one-dimensional and stripped-down to feel like a great Alva Noto album, yet the complex and inventive beats make this an excellent album by minimal techno standards: Unieqav easily holds its own when stacked up against classic Chain Reaction or Mille Plateaux fare and I fucking love that stuff. I suppose I just have a nagging regret that Nicolai did not take this opportunity to break new ground by more aggressively synthesizing his love of techno with his genius for experimentalism and unconventional sounds. That imaginary album would have been a bit more compelling that this relatively straight homage, but Unieqav is nevertheless a stellar homage, succeeding as both a dance album and a master class in dynamics and sound design.