One fine morning in a soundscape, with Alva Noto

“At the moment, I'm trying to get two personalities into one, to bring everything together”.
Carsten Nicolai is an artist whose practice spans a very broad spectrum of interests: the last three decades are studded with his sculptures, paintings, spatial and sound installations. As Alva Noto, still, he is also one of the absolute leading names in contemporary music, whom we find engaged in live performances as well as studio productions and soundtracks, experimentations and exchanges such as his nearly 20-year-long collaboration with Ryūichi Sakamoto. This ongoing challenge of his to the fixed boundaries of genres, disciplines and creative fields – to the contemporary condition of fragmentation of knowledge and commercialization of relationships, to put it bluntly – often adopts space as a means of expression and intervention: from research operations to partnerships like the one with Marsèll – curating the 2023 collections with Transmitter: Receiver, the “multi-sensory seismograph” intercepting the perceptual variety of the universe we inhabit – many of his recent works seek to define spaces that can be alternative to those we are now used to, architectures made of sound called soundscapes. Learning that Nicolai has studied as an architect, specializing in landscape design in Dresden, then East Germany, comes therefore as little or no surprise (“Domus was very important for me to get information about contemporary architectural tendencies and to reach out of my isolation” he has wanted to tell us from the start. Similar statements were also heard from people like John Pawson, for instance).

“When I design soundscapes” Nicolai starts, to bring us straight to the heart of an alternative space of perception, “sound is architecture at the same time: with sound, you’re defining space, maybe in an invisible way, but the same way as you define architectural elements and create social spaces. Sound waves are building materials for me, and also the way I deal with sound is very conceptually based on architecture: I’m building structures that are free of gravity” A state of absolute and invisible freedom, Nicolai tells us, creating complex spaces. “Many of my works are based on very basic sine waves. So when I place a speaker in any kind of environment, this will have a spatial reflection, but if I have multiple speakers, I can place the sine waves in a way that they are creating a kind of landscape, valleys and mountains, made of sound as it gets amplified or deleted.  And I see impulses and rhythmic structures as what architects would consider as static building elements, columns and beams: I’m always thinking first about creating a landscape, then about building inside such landscape, placing some iconic elements I call solitaires or uniques, structures giving a specific authenticity or a specific character to the piece.

Besides this kind of caractère, like Diderot’s Encyclopédie would have called call such embodied identity of architectures in 18th century, these spaces materializing somewhere between physical and emotional realm are collecting the features of an architectural manifesto: still, what place is left for emotions within such kind of projects? “Sound is a kind of universal language” Nicolai says. “Everybody understands sounds. It doesn't matter what kind of context, cultural context or language context they’re coming from, and I think this is one of the one of the biggest advantages when you work with sound, and I think this is the beauty of sound, that our perception of sound has no intellectual level. It kind of works directly. It speaks directly to us without any intellectual computing in between, like smell, or temperature, or atmosphere”.

Carsten Nicolai

A wide emotional range finds room in the construction of Nicolai’s soundscapes, but interaction and collaborations have been key in reaching such creative awareness, as it happened with Japanese musician Ryūichi Sakamoto, another explorer of hybridizations between only seemingly separate genres, worlds, and techniques “The collaboration with Ryūichi (Sakamoto) was really unique: we both moved out of our comfort zone in a collaborative situation where we both learnt from each other very much. We could create something that normally we would not have been able to create alone. I left apart being afraid about harmonics and melodies, I saw the beauty and possibilities in such emotional elements in music, and this is something that Ryūichi taught me, strongly challenging sonically myself, looking for different sound not fitting in into any kind of genre, recognising the technical aspect of our world, but at the same time, bridging the emotions, the acoustic piano or the classical instrument living in a symbiosis with the electronics and creating something new: the first album is now 24 years old, still it doesn't sound that old”.

Component after component, as we kept talking, an implicit architectural manifesto has taken shape; so time had to be the next: “Most architectural schools teach tridimensional architecture, but I think the biggest element in architecture is actually the fourth dimension, the aspect of time, what this dimension can build socially; with sound, in fact, I can build time based three dimensional spaces, which are also produced socially and emotionally. That's the reason why sometimes architecture is not necessarily aesthetically beautiful, but creates incredible social environments. It took me years to understand this, studying, writing and also teaching”.  The work of Nicolai, who is also teaching Time based media at Dresden Academy of fine arts, develops along pretty much non-linear timelines, as shown by Transmitter: Receiver, his recent installation for Marsell in Milan: “This object was actually a very old idea I had 20 years ago, but last year I decided to do it, with all the possibilities I have now, with computers, technologies, sensors, the knowledge I have from previous works; this work crystallized – I like the word crystallized – twenty years after”.

This is something that might sound like clashing with the linear development characterizing the path of architectural work, but Nicolai is no stranger at all to architectural reflection and criticism, since the first experiments he developed with Enric Miralles for his hometown, and there is a specific aspect of architecture acting as an endless source of inspiration, and it has got little to do with linearity: “I find architects interesting more on the conceptual side of their work, when we were young, there was a lot of architects who basically made only plans that never could be built, Daniel Liebeskind or Coop Himmelb(l)au for instance. Postmodernism was not necessarily creating beautiful buildings, but at the beginning concepts were very interesting, on how to make architecture more iconic and identified. I followed Hans Hollein in the beginning, then Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, later Sejima: the invisibility of architecture, was what I loved. And another architect that actually inspired one of my first albums as Alva Noto, called Prototypes, was Walter Pichler. You know, I still compose in a very old school way, writing concepts and looking for visual representation to memorize them, the kind of world I want to express. And these objects by Pichler, also called Prototypes, looked very stripped down, almost technical, plastic or aluminium, so they became the reference I needed”. 

Carsten Nicolai

The implicit manifesto for architecture this conversation was evolving into kept expanding towards the dimension of a manifesto for all practices, as we kept talking: Nicolai’s practice is in fact positioning more and more on a cross-disciplinary stance, based on the typological nature itself of his works: “In the beginning, I was just focusing on the so-called processed stability of objects –conceptual sculptures, sometimes painting, photography – and now I really feel a stronger urge for myself to create full environments that have a complexity: I call them ‘Atmospheres’. For Haus der Kunst in Munich, I created a kind of situation not only defining a space or showing objects: it created a complete atmosphere, containing sound and smell as well, an environment that can be seen as a set design. And I must say my interest comes from making soundtracks for movies. And smaller scale works like what I did with Marsell, or my video works, film works, even soundtracks for other people, like The Revenant or the collaboration with Gucci, these are all element of such idea”. Then when music came to join this crowd, the need for a second identity also came, and that’s when Alva Noto was born. And now the goal is to get these two personalities into one, to bring everything together, Nicolai/Noto says. “Bridging these worlds is key, because we all know the architectural world is world on his own, and so are art and music, they’re pretty much separated: but for me, they belong together very strongly. I mean, dance movement, identity, emotions, architecture, atmospheric smells, they are all belonging to each other. We are humans, we all perceive this kind of elements. So why not try to create something that is finally not specialized?”

Carsten Nicolai

The question would naturally arise, whether such purpose of merging and blurring might result sounding utopian in current times of radicalization of identities, fueled moreover by the turn of relationships towards digital spaces, “I don't think that technologywise and communicationwise we are witnessing any revolution, this is not the future” Nicolai replies instead, “it’s not necessarily different from maybe 2-300 years ago, the fundamentals of human communication, between people, are not so quickly changing as maybe technology around does. And I'm very doubtful about social media. (‘Do you like tiktok?’ ‘I don’t have tiktok’) They are a drug causing addiction, consuming time and personality, useless as they shift people away from their own creativity, their identity, their real social environment. Sure, such completely commercialized black hole, feared by his own creators – as they themselves tell in The social dilemma – might be expiring with us – I have four kids all between 12 and 20, and they are not interested in social media – and it works somehow the way it worked when we grew up with television, but it’s actually more complex, unavoidable: I grew up in Cold war, under the control of socialist State, and now I see that our contemporary global State is much more controlled. By then, I still had an alternative: I could leave that world, those countries, or wait until they collapsed; now instead we have only this world”.

This position is also part of a complex elaboration Nicolai and their generation have carried out on the subject of identity, be it their own or collective, and this is why we wanted to close our exchange by recalling how the Alva Noto alias was born: “When I started my very first label, I knew that I wanted to create an artist name: by then I was traveling through Sicily and I saw the sign for Noto, liked the topography of that city and the way it went along with the label name NoTon, meaning ‘no sound’ in German, but also ‘not on’. Alva came later, from the neon sign of a little bar next to the house where I was living in New York: I later found out it was the middle name of Edison. I could thus create a non-gendered identity not 100% male or female, something really important for me as in the beginning electronic music was so male dominated. And if you look at the history of art in the 20s, or even in the late 60s and 70s it was common that artists created artist names; Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the famous expressionist: we grew up in the same area, and Rottluff was the name of his village. Or A.R. Penck, a German painter, drawer and musician from the 80s: he actually tried to hide his real identity as he was showing in the West while living in the East. So I grew up being surrounded by artists using aliases, for me it was natural to start a different identity, a different name”.