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- Date Released: July 14, 2008
- Genre: Electronic
- Style: Abstract
- Label: Raster-Noton / The Orchard
An ideal fusion of music and noise
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We Say...
Commissioned by the German city of Mannheim on the occasion of its 400th anniversary, UTP is intended to reference utopia, a point its authors relate to the city's Enlightenment-era design principles. Among these is Mannheim's grid-based layout, a "rasterized structure" the musicians implicitly link to their own digital methods. It's a curious take on history, for a city that has been repeatedly all but wiped off the map. Founded in 1607, Mannheim was destroyed in 1622 and again in 1689 — literally paving the way for its high-minded redesign — and in 1940 it became the guinea pig for a new British tactic, incendiary "terror bombing," which wiped out nearly half the city.
Or maybe all that is part of the story here, because this hour-long collection of pieces doesn't sound much like utopia in its "Kumbayah" sense. Alva Noto (a.k.a. Raster-Noton head Carsten Nicolai) and Ryuichi Sakamoto have been working for several years now at pensive, unsettling electro-acoustic that balances limpid piano notes with jarring digital edits, and here they expand their approach to accommodate the collaboration of Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, who bring strings, percussion and woodwinds to the lineup. The resulting merger does indeed live up to a kind of ideal fusion, with massing drones so bound up with static and glitches that it's impossible to tell where the music ends and the noise begins. Given to long arcs of bowed drones and passages full of percussive murmur or furious microtonal flutter, the music occasionally recalls Morton Feldman's deliberate, melancholic compositions. Its moments of improvisation, rather than detracting from the album's sense of purpose, only serve to reinforce the sense of something fleeting and ephemeral. -
They Say...
Commissioned by the city of Mannheim (Germany) for its 400th anniversary, UTP was co-composed by Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The work, whose title is deducted from the word "utopia," is scored for electronics, piano, and chamber ensemble, the latter being Ensemble Modern. It consists in extremely slow-paced tableaux of stretched out octaves and skeletal motives, a Butoh-like performance. The piece is solemn and entrancing, like Morton Feldman's music -- more elegant, perhaps. It marks a new step in the evolution of Nicolai and Sakamoto's music, together and apart, as neither of them had yet concocted something this sparse, this naked. Their previous collaborations could have been filed under "ambient music," but UTP belongs in the contemporary classical bin. This is a CD+DVD set. The CD includes a concert stereo version of the 75-minute work. The DVD has the same performance in 5.1 surround sound, shot with a single camera embracing the whole stage -- you won't see much of the musicians (then again, the stage is dark and not much is happening), but you get a great look at the big (really big!) screen in the back, where minimalistic yet beautiful "interference patterns"-like video art unfolds throughout the performance, minutely choreographed to the music. The DVD also includes a 40-minute "making of" that adds close-up shots of the musicians, an interview with the video artists, and an inside look at the dealings between composers and performers.
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| 01. |  |
attack/transition |
7:24 |
|
| 02. | |
grains |
6:24 |
|
| 03. | |
particle 1 |
6:40 |
|
| 04. | |
transition |
3:32 |
|
| 05. | |
broken line 1 |
6:32 |
|
| 06. | |
plateaux 1 |
8:07 |
|
| 07. | |
silence |
6:51 |
|
| 08. | |
particle 2 |
7:00 |
|
| 09. | |
broken line 2 |
6:29 |
|
| 10. | |
plateaux 2/end |
12:59 |
|
10 Total Tracks, 71:58 Total Length
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Credits
- David Toop - Liner Notes // David Toop - Text // Fernando Aponte - Mixing // Ryuichi Sakamoto - Piano // Ryuichi Sakamoto - Mixing // Ryuichi Sakamoto - Electronics // John Corbett - Clarinet // John Corbett - Clarinet (Bass) // Norika Sora - Project Coordinator // Norika Sora - Management // Carsten Nicolai - Mixing // Carsten Nicolai - Score // Rainer Römer - Percussion // Eva Böcker - Cello // Michael Schmidt - Project Coordinator // Michael Schmidt - Management // Michael Hock - Producer // Dietmar Wiesner - Flute // Dietmar Wiesner - Piccolo // Norbert Ommer - Sound Director // Aaron Baird - Double Bass // Evan Balmer - Project Coordinator // Evan Balmer - Management // Nigel Edwards - Lighting Director
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