Bleep

Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto are two composers with infinitely sprawling resume of collaborators and releases, yet their V.I.R.U.S. pentet of records from 2002 to 2011 seems to have been one of the most illuminating and pivotal musical partnerships for both of them. As kindred spirit experimenters, their fateful meeting in the late 90s and debut album as a duo Vrioon led to two decades of fruitful cooperation, rerouting each artist’s musical path from then on as they created some of the most tender, expansive, and just plain beautiful music to emerge from classical, ambient, and electronic realms.

V.I.R.U.S. is a crossing point between electronic and acoustic, techno and modern composition, micro and macro. Sakamoto had gone Back To The Basics in the late 90s, filtering his globally reaching artpop ethos into minimalist classical and solo piano compositions; it enabled the sketches he would trade with Carsten Nicolai, building up a versatile catalogue of emotive sound art that germinated from the simple combination of piano and electronics. It was an incredibly prolific time of developing timeless albums and enrapturing unreleased material, which grace the V.I.R.U.S. series now put together as a whole.

The classically trained met the mathematically minded, and the series proved to be a crossroads for the two: Sakamoto began experimenting with glitch, noise, and grainy digital ambience on 2004’s Chasm, then exploring negative space before completely upending all preconceptions of his music on 2017’s abstract and immersive async; meanwhile, Nicolai was moving away from sparse, stentorian microsound charged with noise into more textural and melodic work, citing this collaboration as instrumental to his Xerrox series.

Their strengths combined, Nicolai and Sakamoto broke new, alchemical ground throughout Vrioon, Insen, Revep, Utp_, and Summvs. For all the press labelled it as an unlikely combination, the trickles of crystalline piano, pinprick sine tones, and enveloping reverb tails made perfect sense as they merged into a decade’s worth of organic and heartfelt sonic worldbuilding.