Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto's VIRUS series collects the pair's five minimalist electronica EPs 'Vrioon', 'Insen', 'Revep', 'UTP_' and 'Summvs (Remaster)'. Now compiled in a single compendium, which now takes shape as a limited edition slipcased nine album box set, the VIRUS name acronymises all five titles in an eco-friendly, cream-coloured case. With each EP appearing in order, commencing with the digital Y2K dusts of 'Vrioon' (2002) and ending on the more recent textural terminus 'Summvs' (2021), we've a whole two decades' worth of musical stylistic progression and transgression here. Each EP counterposes the other convincingly, not creating a through-lined opus more than complementing each other through sheer happenstance.

Review: Noton Records - an outfit dedicated largely and almost solely to the output of experimental electronic / minimal legend Alva Noto - here presents the full 10" box set version of Infinity, the mammoth set of originally 72 (here just 50) "sound graffities" commissioned to the artist by contemporary art exhibition Documenta X. The aim of Documenta X was to abstract the member of the public from their everyday lifeworld, exposing them instead to bare sonic spaces in which modernist sound fragments were played back, expressly challenging the collective listener's cochlear gaze. None of these pieces amount to full songs on Noto's part; instead they serve as auditory "throw-ups", to borrow from graffiti parlance, mirroring the unconscionable nature of certain visual or aural perceptions - public art works, gradual alterations in the environment, etc. - as we perceive them only intuitively, only in passing, as we submit to the daily bustle of the street. It comes as no surprise that many of these pieces were also played in public spaces outside the white cube, such as airports and public spaces: the tracks squeeze and bend time-space with twinging noisebursts and glitching digital scuzzes; cortically, convexly, chirally inverting the dysthymias of urban life and transience.