- There was a moment in 2000 when electronic music was on the verge of suffocation. Sounds were miniaturized, isolated, deconstructed and exploded. The rhythm, kick and boom were sucked dry, leaving behind only cracked skeletons and whirring machines. Labels like Raster-Noton, 12K, and Mille Plateaux issued a steady stream of glitchy records from Komet, SND, Tol, Produkt, 0/r and CoH—abbreviated and fractured aliases that sounded just like their tracks. At its peak, Tetsu Inoue fed architectural blueprints into his computer and called it an album. Given these conditions, I'm certain that somebody somewhere recorded an album of little more than a whirring hard drive. Believing that I was at the bleeding edge, I bought these albums diligently until one day I decided that the emperor had no clothes and walked away for several years.
At the center of this white noise stands Carsten Nicolai, AKA Alva Noto, and co-founder of Raster-Noton. Thanks to the label's recent string of top-shelf releases, I'm back in their quiet corner. Xerrox Vol. 2 picks up where Vol. 1 left off, this time pushing samples from Michael Nyman, Stephen O'Malley and Ryuichi Sakamoto through Noto's Xerrox software. "Phaser Acat 1" opens the album with the rush of grey fuzz that one expects (a look at the minimal cover art or the six-point font on his website shows that some things haven't changed), but after three minutes the digital grit gives way to music, an almost weightless blend of warm chords and thrumming digital tones. It's beautiful weather. Such stately orchestral maneuvers conjure thoughts of Gas, yet Noto turns Wolfgang Voigt's stormy weather inside out, opening up onto an arid landscape of endless horizon lines.
It's not all easygoing: The tension between the pretty chords and tough static in "Sora" gets uneasy and "Meta Phaser" gradually blooms into the audio equivalent of sandpaper before exiting with a ringing tone that leaves you feeling like you were socked in the head. Such calm-shattering moments remind you that this is indeed experimental audio, yet they also reflect an unfortunate impulse to keep things interesting. If you believe in this sound, Xerrox Vol. 2 is an essential release, and if you simply need a soundtrack for a dead February day or pacing the floors at three in the morning, you can't do much better.
Tracklist 01. Phaser Acat 1
02. Rin
03. Soma
04. Meta Phaser
05. Sora
06. Monophaser 1
07. Monophaser 2
08. Teion
09. Teion Acat
10. Tek Part 1
11. Monophaser 3