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Alva Noto, "Xerrox Vol. 2"
As the second part of a planned five volume series, Carsten Nicolai chose to draw in more contemporary artists' music to collapse and rebuild, compared to the more classically influenced first disc. Here he takes the likes of Stephen O'Malley, Michael Nyman, and Ryuichi Sakamoto as his starting point, but uses their work to bleak soundscapes that eschews the clicks & blip minimal techno Raster-Noton usually thrives on and instead is a darker, ambient set of pieces.
The album opens with a suite of four tracks that are intended to represent one singular soundtrack, but each function on their own. The 12 minute opener "Phaser Acat 1" has a hollow, but heavy ambient quality to it, blasting in white noise and feedback like tones that, at least for the first half, are much more in-line with the likes of digital Merzbow with a hint of black metal chug lingering below (perhaps O'Malley's contributions). For the second half, the noise drifts away but the chug stays, albeit low, as clinical static and soft, lush synths begin to become the focus, the full contrast between guitar-like riffs, digital static, and soft synths are actually not that far removed from some of the more abstract Jesu work.
The remaining two pieces of this opening set, "Soma" and "Meta Phaser," resemble the first generally, continuing the deep, dark ambience with swells of noise and feedback, the latter adding buzzing analog tones and overdriven bass amp feedback while turning the noise up a bit, before allowing everything to fall away into quiet drift.
The remaining pieces are not as stylistically linked as these, but have a similar feel and sense about them, though the actual nuances differ from track to track. "Sora" sounds like a film score that has been bootlegged off of an old VHS tape: the string-based tones and sweeps are audible, but covered in a layer of analog filth that's exaggerated by digital skipping and occasional overdriven bass tones. Both "Monophaser" tracks are a bit less forboding than the others, emphasizing string like electronic tones and static crunch, the former adding in what may be field recordings of thunderstorms into the background.
"Teion Acat," and its predecessor "Teion" are more reserved, but tense and dark in execution, focusing on grim sustained tones and static decay, the latter sounding like a more obvious reworking due to its more cut-and-paste style construction, but the white noise swells and stuttering bass synth components give it an even greater sense of tension than the original, which makes up for any compositional complaints.
While this was a bit different than I was expecting from the label…I usually prepare myself for minimalist fragment tones and the smallest clicks sequenced into rhythm tracks, I was both surprised and pleased at the combination of rawer digital noise and dense atmospheres that are presented here. Then again, the label has yet to disappoint me, so I had no expectation that they suddenly would begin to.
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