Bleep

A Viennese villa constructed of glass walls is the setting of Simon Stone’s 2021 theatre piece Komplizen, for which Alva Noto builds sonic spaces ripe with emotion on his latest album Kinder Der Sonne. The architecture makes physical the invisible barriers that separate us, housing socialites, cunning entrepreneurs, and service providers who clash as their circles mix and are riven by the “social fault lines of our times”. Alva Noto amplifies this in a soundtrack laced with cautious feelings, where stillness transforms into murmuring unease.

There is a dark underbelly to these serene textural pieces that soon appears as harmonic tension swarms the tracks, mirroring the complex social codes the characters uphold and traverse. From the vast yet solitary ‘Kinder Der Sonne - Intro’, where strings wander unfazed through passages of motion and contemplation, to the closing ‘Nie Anhaltender Strom’ full of depth charges and something ominous snaking beneath the dense cloud of rumbling bass, Kinder Der Sonne depicts the veneer of the protagonists’ insular security as it cracks and shatters.

Alva Noto’s affectation for glitches and micro sounds takes on new meaning as they sputter like electric cables throughout the album, scratching and carving into the glass on ‘Ungewissheit Im Sinus’ and surging in a rare moment of explosivity in ‘Aufstand’, where the strifes haunting the characters flare up in a storm of signals. Elsewhere, subtlety tells the story, with a single piano phrase patiently guiding through the pensive soundscape of ‘Die Untergründigen’ while strings and deep bass warily circle one another on ‘Sehnsuchtsvoll’.

Alva Noto lends his sound to theatre on the expressive Kinder Der Sonne, tracing characters saddled with “emotional debt” through ambience both lush and foreboding.