Bleep

The Xerrox series is one of the jewels of Alva Noto’s vaunted and extensive discography. Much like William Basinski’s famous Disintegration Loops, the Xerrox releases find Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) copying and re-copying samples until they have morphed into something entirely different. Basinski used this method to create ghostly ambiences, and there are similar sounds to be found across Xerrox Vol. 4. A few of the cuts are built around similarly beatific fugs, though in Nicolai’s hands these are laced with sparse synth lines and little flushes of bass.

Nicolai also varies the theme throughout the record. The tracks at the beginning of the album appear to have been treated a little more heavily than those later on - their textures are refined in a way that makes one think of Alva Noto’s beautiful cover of The Cure’s ‘A Forest’, while the glitchy processing that ruffles the corners of some numbers has a faint whiff of Oval about it. As the album wears on we also find some more fractured sounds being introduced here, with static crackles and pensive, almost industrial murmurs freighting the dreamscapes Nicolai delivers.

The fourth instalment of Alva Noto’s Xerrox series once again finds the artist creating a set of perfectly imperfect copies.