Alva Noto - HYbr:ID III

A Closer Listen

Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) is a minimalist musician, audio-visual artist, and sound designer par excellence who has been producing an unremitting, sui generis body of work for nearly thirty years. Whether he’s creating soundtracks (Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant being the most prominent), working solo, or collaborating with anyone from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Mika Vainio to – William Basinski and Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore for a lovingly faithful cover of Bowie’s “Subterraneans,” – Noto can be counted on for sounding like nobody else while maintaining and expanding his widely influential oeuvre with each new work.

In keeping with the traditions of minimalism, Noto produces much of his solo work in serial forms. The Xerrox series, begun in 2007, up to four volumes so far with a fifth and final volume promised for the future, presents Noto’s deeply sumptuous ambient work. His Uni trilogy, begun in 2008 with Unitxt, advanced by 2011’s Univrs, and completed with 2018’s Unieqav, embodies Noto’s more beat-centric, dance floor-oriented work. Noto’s latest series, fittingly titled HYbr:ID, serves as a cross between the two.

HYbr:ID I and II were both commissioned works for American choreographer Richard Siegal, and HYbr:ID III sees Noto continuing the collaboration with Siegal for a new dance, Ballet of (Dis)Obedience. (Siegal first worked with Noto’s music in 2013 when he created a dance using Unitxt as the score.) As with those other works, Noto’s score and Siegal’s choreography function independently of each other, with Noto consistently eschewing the aim of creating a substructure of marks and beats for dancers to work with in order to develop an immersive soundscape reflective of his interpretation of the guiding concept behind the dance.

In the case of HYbr:ID III, his inspiration comes from the Japanese art of Noh – roughly speaking, the highly stylized branch of theater that features carved wooden masks, actors performing in slow, concentrated movements and gestures, and morality tales that incorporate the presence of gods and ghosts.

With Noh seeming to serve as a starting point or touchstone to push off from, the music on III tends toward the spatial, glacial, and gestural, reflecting the limited actions and pacing of Noh rather than exploring the specifics of its cultural history. In addition, Noto has stated that he aims for a sculptural quality in these tracks, so while there is a kind of steady-state presence to the music, his astounding dynamic ranges and exacting production techniques make the listening experience anything but sedate.

Track by track, the album demonstrates Noto’s mastery of production. Diving into more rhythm-driven territory, as he does on “Sync Dark,” “Sync Inter,” or “Rehuman,” his beats are never entirely straightforward, but lurch and stumble in tightly controlled bursts. Hovering above or slicing through or stitching those beats together is an array of electrified percussive effects that sizzle and crackle and glint, adding an electrifying tactility and presence to something that in other hands could turn mechanistically frigid.

The majority of the album, however, is decidedly more ambient based. Nearly every track is composed of or buttressed by vast, elongated pads, and part of Noto’s wizardry lies in the myriad ways he builds and treats those pads. Some of them thrum and swell and aspirate with profound symphonic depths (“Collective Open”), some roll out like dense fog that carries hidden cargo (“Script Solitude”), some flirt with the edges of feedback while they rise and harmonize with themselves (“Script Sacre Drone”). Though not essential, headphones are strongly recommended to fully appreciate the dimensionality of Noto’s creations.

Is HYbr:ID III a breakthrough album for Noto? A radical leap in an entirely new direction? Certainly not. But it is a brilliant and beautiful new work and that, in and of itself, is worthy of investigation for fans and the uninitiated. (Damian Van Denburgh)

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