ALVA NOTO Vinyl & CDs

Review: Where to begin with this? Vrioon, quite simply, is a work overloaded with beauty. The blue, heartache solitary piano of Sakamoto bleeding into the micro-constructions and nano-beats of Carsten Nicolai's rewired machinery. "During his first live tour in Japan, Carsten Nicolai met Ryuichi Sakamoto in Tokyo. One year later Nicolai was asked to remix material from Sakamoto for the Japanese magazine Code Unfinished. "The material that was given to me was already layered with digital effects. From one little clean piano piece I made the first track. I combined those simple piano chords with a clear rhythm constellation. Somehow Ryuichi was very surprised and really liked my work. Weeks later he sent me another piece recorded specifically for this project." The result is an interweave of tracks that is quite simply breathtaking, a melange of pure cathartic piano progressions and whispering beats, a re-definition of minimalism and intellectual application into something that is quite clearly open and exposed as a spectrum of emotion and sonic loveliness. Immense.