Alva Noto

Alva Noto

Alva Noto is the recording name of Carsten Nicolai, a visual artist and sound artist from Chemnitz, Germany. Born in 1965, he works in electronic music and related sound art with a minimal, conceptual approach. He studies architecture in his formative years, and that background feeds into the precise, structured character of his work.

His music often uses clicks, glitches, and other small electronic sounds as core material rather than decoration. He works without sequencers, instead shaping compositions through mathematical editing to create exact rhythmic patterns. He also samples sounds associated with electronic information transfer, including fax tones, modem sounds, and telephone clicks and pops, then arranges them into loops with longer electronic tones layered above and below as a piece develops.

Alongside his recording work, Nicolai creates installations and performs in major art spaces including the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, NTT in Tokyo, and the Venice Biennale. He releases music on labels including Mille Plateaux, SFMOMA, and 12k/LINE, and he is an owner and artist at Raster-Noton. Through Raster-Noton, he is responsible for the CD series 20 to 2000, which wins the Golden Nica prize at Prix Ars Electronica in 2000.

His work is associated with ambient, drone, electronic, glitch, IDM, minimal techno, and minimal electronic music. He also appears in the project Opto and in the collaboration Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto.