While Alva Noto’s predilection for pristine sound design remains undimmed, Xerrox Vol. 4 sees a further move from his prior output’s buttoned-up asceticism towards more intimate gestures in a ‘cinematographic emotion of a soundtrack to a film that actually does not exist in reality.’
Eschewing Nicolai’s signature clinical sound design for more harmony-driven strategies
At the outset of the Xerrox pentalogy, Alva Noto nailed his conceptual flag to the mast of the journey, a metaphor by now all but fossilized by the dead air of pop culture narrative cliché. Yet it persists, reanimated–revenant, if you will–in Carsten Nicolai’s margin notes to his latest installment as ‘kind of a journey – perhaps an inner exploration’ (again with the cliché, be it howsoever post-new age). For listeners leery of lolling in such tropes, other signs are available—whether mystery interstellar object, Oumuamua, that blistered through our solar system, or canonical cultural artifacts such as Homer’s Odyssey and Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that inform some of the track titles. Then again, if you just let your mind float free, you could find your own signifieds accrue to the suggestive sonic signifiers of Xerrox Vol. 4.
Conceptually Vol. 4 takes its cue from Vol. 1 (2007) and Vol. 2 (2009) in adhering to the initial concept of digital replication and data manipulation. Like them, it uses extensive reproduction, a process in which inherent flaws in the process of making copies from copies alters everyday sounds to the point where entirely new sounds only tenuously tied to their sources are created. It endows the early volumes with a hazy corroded air, while from Vol. 3 (2015) a focus on dreams and childhood memories brings in a more serene tenor with more emotional resonance, as if concept had been subsumed to feeling. Vol. 4 builds on the platform of Vol. 3, eschewing Nicolai’s signature clinical sound design for more harmony-driven strategies. Where the early volumes betray their provenance from a set of samples extracted from external sources and recorded fragments, here further depths of harmonic and affective color are revealed, as he ‘compounds under a unified cinematic soundscape warm chords, thrumming digital ambiences, liquified electronics, drones, and noise sustained by floods of strings.’
More concretely, you get expansive minimalist ambient post-classical vistas in remote lineage from Eno, Vangelis and classic FAX redolent of a sort of space romanticism. The tone is set on the slow-burn haze of deep ambient opener “Xerrox Kirlian,” with more wistful retro-futurist star-gazing on “Xerrox Utopia,” darker horizons skirted on “Xerrox Sans Retour” and “Xerrox Apesanteur.” Then the Badalamenti-esque “Xerrox Voyage,” the Radiophonic unheimlich maneuvers of “Xerrox Cosmos,” and the string-laden swells of the melancholy “Xerrox Canaux.”
So, while Alva Noto’s predilection for pristine sound design remains undimmed, Xerrox Vol. 4 sees a further move from his prior output’s buttoned-up asceticism towards more intimate gestures in a ‘cinematographic emotion of a soundtrack to a film that actually does not exist in reality.’
Xerrox Vol. 4 is available on Noton June 19, 2020.
