Unitxt is the new album of Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai), the person who together with the label raster-noton formed a unique epoch called clicks`n`cuts and microwave. He contructs complicated audio textures out of simple sounds, mostly of digital character: various clicks, crackle, clutter and noise of different coloring, all this balance on the verge of the notion 'music'.After the release of a rather surprising work Xerrox Vol.1 without rhythm in Unitxt, Nicolai appeals to music based mostly on the rhythmical stream of the abrupt sounds. Something of that kind we could have heard in the series of the works Transall. Rhytms in them is not only the foundation for the composition, it's something more, defining general sounding. Unitxt is perhaps a little bit less subtle and more concrete - it seems that the powerful skeleton of low-frequency pulsations and more dense stream of sound inject enormous charge of energy straight into the listener's veins.
Two tracks created in cooperation with the French Anne-James Chaton (who reads the sequence of figures in tracks U_07 and U_08-1) became a perfect addition for the whole album. In such a way the author emphasized the concept of the album - the transfromation of the test data into the sound. A great amount of this material was created with the help of transformation of various text, graphic and other files into the sound.
The second part of the CD includes these very sound files which served as the raw material for the main album's part. Such decision - something like the unexpected ending of a book - will be interesting for musical gourmets.
In general the album wasn't a great surprise, nevertheless it underlined the basic concepts of Carsten Nicolai's creative work.
- Alva Noto
- raster-noton