★Raster-Noton
The Drive
Billed as a soundtrack to an imaginary road movie this latest album from Jon Egeskov's Pixel project (his third in all) reaches into your subconscious and yanks out whatever images are lodged in there. Using a basic palette of miniscule percussive elemnts and delicately manipulated amplifier hiss Egeskov instils a sense of gentle motion, sounding out dream-like engine noise that propels the listener down whatever shady lane they're prepared to venture down. The floating hum and crinkled analogue…
Vox Tinnitus
Long deleted, few available: objects and phenomena commonly viewed as "static" often appear to be lively processes or life-forms in a different scale, dimension or system of coordinates. it is possible to observe known "hidden" activities (such as planetary motion, cellular life or electro-magnetic disturbances) by using an appropiate technique. however, these processes can also be perceived as anomalies in a state of enhanced awareness or hyper-sensitivity. sometimes they are fun, too.---------…
Revep
LAST COPIES Now deleted, this is the super-limited transparent vinyl. Revolving around a collaborative new arrangement of Sakamoto's classic 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence', this third outing for Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto has been once again packaged and delivered with utmost attention to detail from the quite remarkable Raster Noton imprint. Designed to accompany their extensive tour through much of Asia and Europe this Summer, 'Revep' is another indispensible record from two absolute…
Set Your Center Between Your Parts In Order To
Originally released in 2006, Set Your Center Between Your Parts In Order To is the follow-up release to the stellar debut, Display, by Danish artist Pixel aka Jon Egeskov. As a professionally-trained jazz musician with academic credentials, Egeskov furthers his journey into the realm of minimalistic electronic music. With distinct parts, he continues merging digital (sound) artifacts with subsonic bass lines in a rather allusive manner. Inspired by African conflict and cross-rhythms, Pixel exami…
Raster Edits
Most people know Mark Fell and Mat Steel under the name SND. Like no other project before, they stand for the propagandized clicks-and-cut sound. They toured with Autechre and released two records in 1999 as Blir. The minimally-designed covers and the anonymous layout reveal that Blir as well as SND are names of projects rather than names of a band. Blir was always meant to be an open platform. Mat and Mark had been working in the surrounding field of Sheffield University where they first met Au…
Liedgut
Awesome new raster cd..."We're completely blown away by Raster Noton at the moment. There used to be a time, back in the mid-late 90's, when we had a total obsession with the work of Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart, aka Atom Tm. His seemingly endless series of albums for his own 'Rather Interesting' label not only displayed a visionary ability to harness technology into an ever-changing series of pseudonyms and personalities, but also somehow managed to do so with the kind of attention to detail and…
Xerrox 2
OK, brace yourselves. Returning to his much lauded Xerrox project, Alva Noto has out of the blue delivered one of the most emotionally arresting and quite simply jaw-dropping album's we've heard in recent times. Carsten Nicolai once again shuns the pinpoint precision for which he's become renowned, turning to a more abstract yet harmony-driven working methodology. As with the first Xerrox album, the starting point is a set of samples culled from external sources; this time around, snippets and r…
Gas
For the first time ever, this book wolfgang voigt – gas presents the visual aspect of the comprehensive gas project. it is not meant to be a monolithic retrospective of his visual work, but it features a broad spectrum of photographic images taken between 1995 and 1998 showing many different moods and perspectives of wolfgang voigt’s cosmos. what they all have in common, however, is the mystical focus and seemingly, the blurring of boundaries between lightness and darkness, happiness and depress…
Fades
Catalogue: size 29 cm x 24 cm, 128 pages, 52 photos (48 stills from the movie + 4 installation views) + DVD pal, 13 min, stereo and 5.1 surround. Fades is video installation for a specifically designed environment. ultra fine sprays of mist are introduced into a space in which the white light of the projection manifests itself. These fades move in synchrony to the sound creating a variety of shapes and structures based on linear and logarithmic wave modulations. The main focus does not lie on th…
Unununium
unununium (r-n 111) is the first release of the new raster-noton unun series. The name of the series derives from the greek atomic numbers of the chemical elements 111 119 in the periodic table. NHK is a collaboration of Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro who have been working together since 2006 when they both lived in Osaka. Kouhei started making music back in 1992 focusing on rather experimental compositions. He has been working with various artists such as Merzbow, Asmus Tietchens, Sean Bo…
Plastic Star
Olaf Bender is co-founder of Raster-noton label. With Plastic star he (pre-)releases an ep of his upcoming album death of a typographer on the label. Plastic star, the title track, illustrates quite well his main concern with music. a stoical bass drum beat grows, gains energy and intensifies with expressive guitar-like sound waves into an intense and propulsive piece. The sound pretty much reminds of rock music, of the 80-s, but byetone rather focuses on the concept and attitude of that music. …
Rhythm
LP version. Probably Bretschneider's most direct, clear and concentrated work yet, ãRhythm' is neither pop nor avant-garde, but deals simply with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm. A combination of programming, composition and construction is connected with his very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound but always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures.
Insen Live
In 2005 and 2006 three major tours of insen led the artists alva noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto around the world. Raster-noton is pleased to present insen live dvd as a document of this project. Recordings took place at Casa da música, Porto, Portugal, on june 11th 2006 and at Sonar festival 2006, Barcelona, Spain, on june 15th 2006. Besides material from 2005 insen album the dvd contains previously unreleased tracks such as xerox and barco. The dvd in dolby 5.1 surround sound comes in a cardboard cove…
Automne fold
ollowing his highly successful debut stabil (r-n073), Kangding Ray releases his second full length record on raster-noton, entitled Automne fold. With Automne fold, David Letellier has evolved from the quiet, pristine flow of his debut record to sounds that are raw, dark and organic on this second release. pulsating rhythms become lost in within walls of saturated strings, words are spoken over bowed acoustic guitars, and analog synths collide with urban field recordings. Vocals are a central th…
Deathofatypographer
Death of a typographer is meant to be a snap shot. The release was recorded in a winter week in Berlin. Only the pre-released single plastic star was created in sunny athens. The album contains the original session version of plastic star. The music of death of a typographer carries the special sound of raster-noton - but it is different: the tracks act as focal points, as elegy of an latently flowing stream, a stream that still moves on even when the music has long faded away. The tracks do not…
strings
strings is primarily an attempt to reconcile the aesthetics of digital sound with that of the more traditional music instruments and to enrich the respective domains with the qualities of each other. In a larger scale, the album targets the stereotypes in today's perception of music, trying to smooth out the borders between academic and popular, traditional and contemporary, serious and amusing - all in favour of music. The choice of instruments follows coh's own experience in music: from years …
transform
'transform', originally released on mille plateaux (mp 102, 2001), is now being re-released on raster-noton. the album, released as cd, comes with a new cover and digitally remastered. On 'transform', alva noto means to reduce the aesthetic of pop to the bone. Rather than in pop music, where the basic focus lies on harmonic and melodic forms, on transform they give way to pure rhythm structures derived from only sine tones and white noise, which nevertheless convey an emotional level. transform …
Test Pattern
Following dataplex cd (raster-noton, r-n068), test pattern is the second audio release in Ryoji Ikeda's multimedia project datamatics; an ongoing exploration of the potential to perceive the invisible multiÐsubstance of data that permeates our world. test pattern acts as a system that converts any type of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. through the conversion of raw data into digital audio files, ikeda enables us to listen to the flo…
Plays Cosey
Coh plays cosey CD is the first part of an ongoing collaborative project between Ivan Pavlov-COH and cosey Fanni Tutti known for her solo performances and work with Chris Carter-CTI as well as for being a part of the radical cultural phenomena COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. Very much a statement rather than just a musical venture, Coh plays cosey deals with concepts of honesty, trust, privacy, communication as well as (perception of) sexuality. The work represents a very close, if an …
Robotron
Raster-noton's flagship Signal - Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai - is something like the reference group of one of the pivotal labels of new minimal electronic music. Although only having released one cd so far, their sessions and concerts have been very influential until today. Some of those tracks of the past years now result in a compilation that joins the work of the three masterminds of Raster-noton, but not like a simple aggregation of egos, much rather like a conversa…