Bleep

The first instalment of Alva Noto’s new series HYbr:ID aligns his prolific work in digital culture, performance, visual art and scientific phenomena with his heterogenous compositional methods. HYbr:ID Vol. 1 captures the music commissioned for the score of ‘Oval’, a choreographic piece directed by Richard Siegal and performed by the Staatsballett Berlin at the Berlin State Opera in 2019. Having navigated sound’s limitless territories over decades using a unique system of signs, spectrums and visual symbols, this work culminates his unbounded vision into cinematic perfection.

Inspired by scientific events Alva Noto’s audio-visual language searches for a form binding the scales of astrophysics with digital mechanics in order to capture incalculable phenomena. With songs titled ‘Hadron’, ‘Blackhole’ and ‘Collider’, its elements orbit expansively throughout nine compositions, around fathomless sub-booms, delicate white noise and distant fluctuations. A visual artist as well as musician, the album is accompanied by graphic notations which guide its acoustic movements according to his philosophy: with his sonic expressions mapping universes as intricate as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and with the the acute detail of cellular micrography.

Meanwhile, as part of an artistic generation operating transitionally between disciplines, the chords and rhythms he designs for a stage performance are closely entwined with his own research - of the impact of sound on the human body, of cosmology or of quantum physics. In spite of its monolithic beauty, in revealing the imaginative aspects which essentially determine facts of our nature, the music of Alva Noto becomes highly moving - in the corporeal and the incalculable expanses we're still to navigate.