- If you asked your average clubber to name significant electronic labels, Raster-Noton probably wouldn’t be the first to spring to mind (or even the second, third, fourth…) Carsten Nicolai, Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider's label has carved out a reputation for cutting edge digital sound art with a highly refined visual aesthetic, not qualities usually associated with dance music, but as the recent Raster-Noton showcase in Tokyo proved, the label is just as interested in moving your body as mind.
The night opened with a performance by Cyclo, a collaborative project between Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda that typifies the Raster-Noton interest in combining sound with vision. The club was bathed in modulations of white noise as an oscilloscope projected behind the duo visualized its sound frequencies, the flickering green lines illustrating that there was indeed structure to the sound. Sharp clicks and pops served as beats as the noise intensified, before the sound waves finally formed an almost perfect square of wildly flickering light, a visual representation of the digital howl that cut through to your very bones. Chaos, yet contained within a precise form. It was a bracing start to the evening.
Pixel (Danish artist Jon Egeskov), who is fascinated by rhythm and metre, crafted a live set out of complex interlocking polyrhythms. An absence of melody focused attention on the sharp digital beats, turning what could have been considered an academic exercise into something compellingly physical. Slowly but surely part of the audience began nodding their heads to the beats in acknowledgement of the fact that the music was targeting their bodies as well as their heads.
Recent signee Kangding Ray (French artist David Letellier) hinted at possible new directions for Raster-Noton in a set that married the label’s trademark digital minimal rhythms to noticeable melodies. Warm, faintly melancholic tones, sine waves, basslines and guitar loops accompanied precise beats that encouraged the audience to take a step closer to actually dancing. It was lovely and engaging, and is, along with Carsten Nicolai’s collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, some of the most immediately accessible music that I’ve heard from the label.
Olaf Bender is the mind behind Raster-Noton’s distinctive graphic design, yet he occasionally performs live sets as Byetone. Any remaining doubts that Raster-Noton could produce dance music were soon dispelled as Bender’s beats, made up of dense layers of sound, began dropping onto the dancefloor. The audience danced with their entire bodies as the beats came slamming down, sharp and hard-edged, like a series of fast-falling Tetris blocks. Meanwhile, bars of light danced behind Bender, pulsating to the beat.
Carsten Nicolai, currently receiving deserved praise for his sublime collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, closed the showcase with a set under his Alva Noto alias. Nicolai is an intensely scientific artist, approaching his performances as a process where various elements (packets of digital sound, visuals, the audience and their expectations) come together and interact. Black and white bars, reminiscent of his “Telefunken” release, rolled up and down behind Nicolai as clipped microscopic beats clicked and popped their way across the dancefloor. Rhythmic, minimal, and laboratory precise, Nicolai’s music speaks of the interplay of data in 21st century society and our various responses to it. To be exact, as often as it can be overwhelming, it can be danced to.
Indeed, apart from Cyclo's set, this was a night of dance music. The fact that Pixel, Kangding Ray, and Byetone all danced behind their laptops left no doubt about that. Granted, you might not hear these tracks out on the dancefloor next weekend, but nonetheless, this was dance music, refined and distilled to its purest elements, white hot from the digital forge.