The Entroporium

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Even though it was just a limited edition of 5,000 on German label Raster-Noton, Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Vrioon still created enough fuss to become The Wire’s 2003 Electronic Album Of The Year. Noto took three simple piano themes from Sakamoto and treated them with all manner of clicks, whirs and drones to create a soundscape with no apparent connection to genre or ethnic musics. The result was a suite of beautiful tone-poems that seemed to fit into any situation; I can remember using this album as a soundtrack for a lonely rainy morning in downtown Seattle, for deep spreadsheet projects at work and any number of times and places as a bedtime calming device. Vrioon may be a distinct world, but it’s highly portable one.

Noto & Sakamoto’s new release, Insen, extends Vrioon by widening its compositional and aural possibilities beyond tone-poems to tighter pieces with a more traditional sense of drama and song. The Raster-Noton site describes Insen as a souvenir of a summer spent at a Berlin studio, and indeed Insen’s tracks do seem more bounded by time, memory and place than do Vrioon‘s.

The track I’ve selected for your review is typical of Insen, but atypical of the Noto/Sakamoto collaboration to date. “Moon” has the dramatic rising, falling, addition and subtraction of the best techno club tracks, but as if everything has been removed – no melody, no bass, nothing to grab on to, just piano and the whispering of machinery, a rave at a recital three blocks from your house on a quiet full moon night. “Moon” is also possibly the most plain fun that Noto’s been since the Transrapid EP. It must have been good times in Berlin last summer.

[Soundtrack]
Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto – Moon.mp3

BBC and Angry Robot like Insen, too

Raster-Noton’s Insen page

Get a hard copy of Insen or a soft copy of Vrioon, which is otherwise Out Of Print.