Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto, UTP_

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.