The Homeopathic Cracking Noise
Rastermusik/Noton publishes the CD Magazine "20' to 2000" for the last minutes of this millennium.
It is often claimed that contemporary forms of electronic/digital music and technology based forms of visual art go together well. But maybe this is only theoretically so. Often this closeness is just a strategic trick used by artists who want to boost their street and youth culture credibility by inviting DJs to do sessions at their opening parties; or it is used in a similar fashion as a PR-stunt by party and club entrepreneurs as a fig leaf for their boozy business of making party crowds happy. People who are involved in both fields with equal passion, talent and also recognition are truly rare. One such exception is Carsten Nicolai.
Carsten Nicolai, born in Chemnitz, formerly Karl Marx Stadt, GDR, held his first important exhibitions at the gallery Eigen+Art in Leipzig in the late eighties. As insiders know, the artists who at that time had gathered around this gallery also formed somewhat of a "class of the late GDR". Carsten and his brother Olaf Nicolai, Rainer Goers, Peter Dittmer, Twin Gabriel, the Levandovskys and a few others promoted by gallerist Lybke and curator and critic Cristoph Tannert were a recognizeable artistic avantgarde also by western standards in the already liberalised climate - at least for the cultural elite - of the late GDR.
When the wall came down they were eagerly snatched away by galleries and art institutions from Cologne to New York City. Some of them might have thought that the Hausse of the Wende-climate would go on forever, others did move on, as Carsten Nicolai did. In addition to his artistic work, which mainly consisted of painting and installations, he started to explore his interest in soundspheres.
His favorite sound materials come from old electronic equipment, like valve amplifiers, tv tubes and waveform generators, which he blends with more up-to-date technologies such as samplers and sound editing software for power books, such as Peak or Metasynth. While other "experimental" sound artists using similar techologies tend to create wild and sinuous soundwave onslaughts, Nicolai has the gift of creating minimalist soundscapes which can be of a soothing or almost healing effect to the listener. Cracking is not identical to cracking, and it is the artist's talent which brings to the fore the warmth and human-friendliness of the old electronic instruments being used - as if the sounds of fifties electronica were a remedy to the more cruel forms of suffering which are inflicted upon us by the current software technologies.
With his minimalist compositions he soon found allies such as Mika Vainio (member of pan sonic / saehkoe), the Japanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda and the Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan. Peljhan and Nicolai together staged a fantastic open air all-night audiovisual event dedicated to Nicola Tesla at the ars electronica festival in September last year. In collaboration with young enthusiasts for electronica in his home town Chemnitz Nicolai formed the label Rastermusik/Noton which publishes his own music and the music of other groundbreaking musicians.
The most important project for Carsten Nicolai this year is 20' to 2000. Starting in January 99 the noton label is issuing a series of 12 CDs, each lasting 20min. The concept is that artists should do a piece for the last 20 minutes of the year 1999 - writing down their ideas in sound as a sort of manifesto of this millennium.
For more information please contact:
noto@tuna.net
www.rastermusic.com