The latest missive from Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, finds the second volume of his Xerrox series delving deeper into rugged terrains of digital arcana, sidestepping the sterility of Nicolai's hard drive to unearth the layers of warmth therein. "Xerrox" is apparently Nicolai's more savory term for what we all know as sampling, but the characteristics he overlays on his copied/mutated pieces effectively "mirrors"/channels their respective origins. The roster of artists nicked for this collection is impressive enough — Michael Nyman, guitar-terrorist Stephen O'Malley, Ryuichi Sakamoto — but Nicolai's far too adroit a composer to let the original's chips fall where they may. What is interesting is how he both covets and transforms contexts so effectively, subtly or otherwise, here, and how such transformations achieve their wonderfully crystalline results, wrought with a tensile if fragile beauty that is usually anathema in the silicon milieu.
Things get off to a chilly yet beautifully immersive start with the twelve minute "Xerrox Phaser Acat 1", the opening low-end supertanker trawls and bits of tattered noise presumably reworked O'Malley-isms, soon redirected into a melancholy Nyman loop that instantly recalls the work of Wolfgang Voigt's forest perilous Gas projects. With its surfeit of rubbery strings and strums of distant amp fuzz, this is one of the most lustrous pieces of music Nicolai's produced to date. From there the album pitches and rolls on quite a tumultuous digital sea. "Xerrox Soma" drafts long, weaving ambient drones into what is at once an enveloping then collapsing atmosphere, a place where black stars hang in forbidding skies; "Xerrox Monophaser 1" instead beggars luminosity, coaxing those once black stars to twinkle and exude their dying light, Nicolai folding broad tones into distant thunderclaps and arcing electronic shoals of sound. "Xerrox Teion Acat" courts more abrasive sonic fonts thanks to flying digital spittle and gently massaged glitch that assumes a monolithic half "rhythm" of sorts, the varying hues on hand a phalanx of warped emotions and pensive moves, bent sinister.
Nicolai's had a steady hand in digital exercising so long that he's since transcended vague notions of what constitutes "glitch" music, errorist tendencies, recombinant modalities, or whatever other clever-sounding terminology is thrown at him. He's now arrived at a place where the surety of his compositional prowess is complete, where the act of digital sound-sculpting, pure in design and obvious in execution, nevertheless exudes enough of an "organic" warmth to underscore that, yes, hands all too human are indeed tweaking the circuitry. Though his is a career still in evolution, Xerrox Vol. 2 might well be Nicolai's finest work yet.
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