Carsten Nicolai: I’ve always thought that I’m working here with sound

and I should not limit myself to just a notation system or anything like musical related.

I started basically [in] architecture specialising in landscape design. I learned what space means. I mean how we are using space as a social space, for instance. And how can you navigate in a space as a human? Or how can it be useful? But what it did to me was that I was trained more or less, to think very holistically.

So when, and I think this kind of practice, it’s still inherent in my artist practice.

I was not interested in anything that felt related to traditional musical structures. I was more interested in sound, in the capability of sound, because sound is basically, for humans. We have relatively different scale, maybe than some other animals, but sound is much bigger than just the frequencies we hear, and inside sound, there is one genre called music.

‘HYBR:ID UNI PARA', it refers to some recording series, I started almost 15 years ago.

The material from that performance all comes from the recordings from the older and from the newer ones. They are kind of rearranged. The images, even if they are using specific algorithmic models, how to visualise sound, they're all in this moment generated.

One of my first performances ever was...I was invited to perform in Tokyo, and this was under the name of Noto. I didn’t have yet the Alva Noto pseudonym. This was a very reduced ideas of sine wave, white noise, and basically completely avoiding any kind of musical structure. What I was really surprised [by] was that after the performance, there was a backstage gathering, and I got introduced to Ryuichi [Sakamoto]. When we started the collaboration, basically, we agreed to a certain kind of role. So Ryuichi was basically doing the piano. Which means he had the more classical part and the acoustic instrument part, and I was more the electronic part. But then in the live shows, we kind of broke this apart. I started as well getting not afraid anymore about musical structures and he wanted to do more abstract electronics. So we tried a little bit, I almost like flipped the roles.

The last collaboration we did was actually based on the album ‘12’. I did these two films, and Ryuichi was very much trusting me always on the visual side because I developed always them for the shows. I developed the visuals, I developed the stage concept, and he was always very open towards visual artists in general. It was a great opportunity, as well, to work together, challenging ourselves, like this is completely kind of new territory here. It did something, what I find really interesting. We kept collaborating. The physical body disappears, but the spirit and the way, how we collaborate, maybe is not disappearing at all. We just continue. Because, as well, in the past when we did albums together, he was sending me stuff. We’d not necessarily been—it was not needed that we'd been physically in one space.

When I’m performing, I’m always trying to create a kind of sphere. I mean, you could call this, as well, as atmosphere. And this atmosphere is created by several elements. So, there’s maybe sound. There’s humidity, maybe rain, maybe winds, there is maybe a certain kind of smell. It’s not only a screen and audio system. I think it’s actually more than that. I would love to deliver something where everybody can travel in their own kind of universe.