Noton Germany レコード& CD

Review: NOTON release the much-fussed-over fifth volume of Alva Noto's Xerrox album series, Volume 5. Based on and around the invention of the xerox paper copy, Noto first kicked off the Xerrox series in 2007, aiming to fashion a series of releases themed after the idea of copies of images, both visual and acoustic, being more more memorable than the originals (just as xerox machines created more memorably textured versions of original paper documents). In the words of the artist, the Xerrox series "aimed to create a whole cycle of tracks that frame both the beginning and the end. The motif of the journey continues, but this time, the story reaches a dissolution through a conceptual object that embarks on its own journey into infinity." The fifth volume, released in 2024, here again deploys a series of static and stretched emotive texture-sketches, based on from-scratch recordings and achieved through the process of copying, manipulating and reshaping.

Review: Storied German ambient, microsound and electronica musician Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) shares the fifth volume of his intentionally indefinite Xerrox series, Xerrox Vol. 5. First begun in 2007, after envisaging a series of albums released in chronic sequence, the Xerrox series expressly aims to prove that the continued copying and replication of recorded sound will produce an indefinite variation, each copy infinitely more interesting than the last. With every edition of Xerrox using the same album cover, the sonic contents of the Xerrox albums similarly mimic each other's movements, through a process of making minuscule changes that go onto produce cascading, domino-effecting results. The palette is expansive and cinematic as ever, though it is striking to know that these suites were achieved solely through the manipulation of recordings made and subsequently timestretched from scratch.