(Olaf Bender & Carsten Nicolai)
June 23 to August 31, 2007
Opening, June 23, at 12 am
concert: June 23, SAT, Montreal, 09:00 pm

Frank Bretschneider, Olaf Bender, Senking
Texte de présentation
Exhibition and concert curator : Eric Mattson

Texts and images courtesy of attitudes - espace d'arts contemporains, Genève. Thanks: Olivier Kaeser & Jean-Paul Felley
http://www.attitudes.ch/expos/10_4/raster_noton/raster-noton.htm
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Since its creation in 1999, raster-noton has been exploring minimalist experimental sound. Raster-noton resulted from the merging of two labels, rastermusic, founded by Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider at Chemnitz, Germany, in 1996, and noton.archiv für ton und nichtten, founded by Carsten Nicolai, also in Chemnitz, in 1995. The investigations by raster-noton on sound frequencies and sequences are principally developed in the field of music, yet also overflow into the visual arts with much talent. Their work places an importance on minimal and modular graphic work, thanks to the skill of the graphic designer Olaf Bender, as well as the experimental pieces by the artist Carsten Nicolai - better known in the world of electronic music under the pseudonym of Alva or Alva Noto -, whose reputation is already well established.

At attitudes, the exhibition by raster-noton is polymorphous. An 8 metre long neon light, White line white, whose intensity vary depending on the energy flow generated from an original musical composition, is suspended, separating the room in two. A new wallpaper piece, of which the motifs are the graphic symbols of the sound texture, is presented. We also discover an up-dated version of Telefunken version 2 by Carsten Nicolai. This piece is composed of three synchronised flat screens on which are transmitted the dynamic movement of lines issued from an electronic signal. The archives of raster-noton is also presented via various media: firstly their publications, characterised by highly stylised graphics, the music CD's produced by the label - which are diffused via i-pod - and the Archiv 1, a collection of micro-films illustrating the aesthetics and concept of raster-noton. This is shown on a micro-film reader designed by the company Carl Zeiss Jena at a time when the computer was nothing more than a future dream.


The exhibition of raster-noton is a collaboration between attitudes and La Bâtie, Festival de Genève. Thanks to Eric Linder, Olivier Suter and all the staff of La Bâtie, and also Sharp Electronic (Suisse).
raster-noton.about
Rastermusic/noton is a cooperative of electronic music labels based in Germany. In 1999, artists from the labels rastermusic and noton.archiv für ton und nichtton joined forces thus taking the first step towards a collaboration uniting sound and artistic design. Rastermusic was founded by Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider in 1996 at Chemnitz, Germany. The main part of their research was dedicated to repetitive minimalist music, solely generated by computers. From the beginning, the notion of series underlined each creation. In order to highlight the idea behind the music, little emphasis is attached to the personality of the artist. In 1998, Frank Bretschneider left the rastermusic label and since then Olaf Bender has been responsible for rastermusic.
noton.archiv für ton und nichtton was founded at Chemnitz, Germany, in 1995 by Carsten Nicholai as a platform for conceptual and experimental projects in the domain of music and the visual arts. After publishing, the still ongoing, clear series in 1996, the idea of a conceptual CD magazine emerged and the project was finally realised in 1999 as the first collaboration by raster-noton: "20 minutes to 2000". In the year 2000, it won the Golden Nica Ars Electronica award (Linz/Austria) in the digital music category.
Today, raster-noton consider themselves to be an open collective of artists working in multimedia on the periphery between pop, art and science.
Olaf Bender lives and works as a freelance musician and graphic designer in Chemnitz.
Carsten Nicolai lives and works as a freelance musician and artist in Berlin.
Frank Bretschneider lives and works as a freelance musician in Berlin
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ilégende:
Vue de l'exposition raster-noton (Olaf Bender & Carsten Nicolai), 2004

légende:
Vue de l'exposition raster-noton (Olaf Bender & Carsten Nicolai), 2004
courtesy : attitudes - espace d'arts contemporains, Genève

légende:
raster-noton (Olaf Bender & Carsten Nicolai)
Gaussches Rauschen (positif) - Wallpaper, 2004

légende:
Carsten Nicolai, Telefunken (version2), 2003

by magnus haglund. it was meant for an book published on the occassion of 10th anniversary of attitudes.
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What kind of beauty? In the attitudes art gallery in Geneva two opposing walls are covered with a black and white wallpaper. Repetitive graphic signs and abstract data turning into arabesquelike patterns. Rhythms to be seen, erased parts of information data creating a series of broken signals. When the eyes are moving through the changing design, an elusive dreamlike version of the room takes shape. An imaginary music room.
In between the walls a light installation is dividing the room in two separate parts: a demarcation line with the one side as empty as the other. In one of the corners of the room an archive of 71 different art projects are displayed on an oldfashioned Carl Zeiss Jena microfilm reader. A miniature museum showing a series of material investigations and close observations, a wunderkammer of record covers and minimal art installations.
Although the gallery room is mostly silent, it is vibrating with sounds. Harsh and warm sounds, mathematical noise, flickering rhythms of the mind. This is the intriguing world of raster-noton, a meeting place for the German sound and visual artists Carsten Nicolai, Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider. What the exhibition at attitudes is showing is, above all, the need for a new vocabulary concerning the understanding of their arts. Even if they have released a constant output of recordings through the years on their own recordlabel raster-noton, mostly under their respective artist names Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai), Byetone (Olaf Bender) and Komet (Frank Bretschneider), it’s in the end difficult to judge what is music and what is visual art.
The questioning of what is heard and what is seen, and the juxtapositions between the two, are recurring themes in the raster-noton-aesthetic. The ears become optical instruments, the movement of the eyes a way to understand the complex act of listening. Something they show with an impressive consistency during these August days in Geneva, with a series of performances for the La Bâtie Festival.
Through the layerings of surface noise and low frequences, rooms are built into rooms, and doors are opened into the acoustical dimensions of contemporary architecture. This utopian perspective can be traced back to the visionary ideas of Buckminster Fuller and the functional aesthetic of the Bauhaus school. Forms to be built and rebuilt, an attitude of objectivity and matter-of-factness that in itself, through the absence of ornamentation, brings the mind in tune with an alternative beauty. A beauty that is never seductive.
When I first heard the recordings of Alva Noto, in the end of the 1990s, it reminded me of the pointillism of Anton Webern, and this impression has remained over the years. Not that the music has anything to do with the serialism of the Darmstadt school. But the minimal glitsch rhythms and sturdy sinus tones express a similar romantic feeling that is hidden inside the rigid structures of Webern’s pieces. A sense of fluidity and organic movement that is as much Nature as Culture. The fact that Carsten Nicolai is trained as a landscape architect is not unimportant for an understanding of the way he deals with forms like snow crystals and loop structures.
One of these August days in Geneva, I join Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender for a car ride up the mountains, to the north of Montreux. While driving on the small, winding alp roads, Olaf puts a record on the cdplayer with the early recordings of Fats Domino. The young rock’n’roll voice, so innocent, joyful and strangely melancholly, fills the room of the car: Blueberry Hill, Ain’t That a Shame and You Said You Loved Me. It’s a wonderful moment, with the natural flow of Fats’ light tenor and the impressive mountain peaks and vertiginous ravines outside the car windows. We become one with the landscape, not only the landscape opening up on the other side of the mountain crest, but as well with the utopian landscape of perfect pop music.
Magnus Haglund
writer and critic, based in Gothenburg, Sweden