Aleph-1 is a project by carsten nicolai aka alva noto / noto. aside from his sound works under those pseudonyms, aleph-1 is electronic music with an acoustic sound aesthetics that was especially developped for the IDEAL Recordings label. The concept of aleph-1 derives from the theories of the mathemtician Georg Cantor, who was teaching in halle, germany, a city, to which Nicolai is deeply connected with through his family.
The sound pieces of aleph-1 deal with the idea of infinity in terms of structure and length. Without actual beginning or end, they fade in and out. The pieces have a very logically constructed nature of overlapping tracks, which seem to be never the same thus could be extended into infinity. The album consists of eight rhythmic circles, based upon acoustic material, at first sight very minimal but always carrying pulse and melody. Music you can loose yourself in.
For a deeper knowledge of the term aleph-1, here’s a short definition:
1884 the term alpeh-1 was introduced by Georg Cantor into the mathematical world. Since then the first letter of the hebrew alphabet, combined with a number has been used to represent the cardinality (or size) of infinite sets. the aleph numbers differ from infinity (∞) commonly found in algebra and calculus. Alephs measure the sizes of sets; infinity on the other hand, is commonly defined as an extreme limit of the real number line, or an extremal point of the extended real number line. While some alephs are larger than others, ∞ is just ∞.
Some thoughts on the Aleph recordings, including a letter to Carsten
Nicolai.
Dear Carsten,
I just want to remind your of the fruitful days we spent in Geneva in
August 2004, doing that 16-hours-interview that became the material for
the essay I wrote for the catalogue of your exhibition the following
year at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. The city of Geneva was like a
passage, leading us into foreign and complex territories of the mind,
like the fact that you stayed in L’Hotel Carnavin, the same hotel that
features in the Tintin story The Calculus Affair – a book based on the
fact that professor Calculus invents a sound-device capable of
destroying objects from a distance – or the strange encyclopedic
thoughts linked to the fact that the Argentinian master writer of
imaginary fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, died in Geneva, in 1986.
It all comes back to me when I listen to these fantastic new recordings
of yours, issued on the Gothenburg Ideal label, with their rhythmic
variations on a most limited set of sound materials. Here you use the
alias of Aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. But Aleph was
as well the name of a book of short stories by Borges, published in
1949. The title story of that book presents the idea of infinite time
and the experience of finding the whole universe contained in a single
place. Maybe this kind of connections and correspondences makes me a
bit superstitious and hyper-interpretative, but it’s rather astonishing
how well the sounds of the Aleph recordings fit with the abstract
freedom of the Borges story. The music is beautiful and mysterious in
the same way that Borges wrote, with a precise alertness to the minimal
changes of the material. You have to listen carefully. Which is not a
problem at all, but a feeling of possibilities.
The endlessness that comes out of these variations makes the music
physically direct and ephemerally conceptual in the same time. The
connection to your sculpture/sound work Bausatz Noto from 1998, with
its construction of four Technics 1210 record players playing a series
of endless loops, seems very natural. And naturalness is the key to
this music, I think. Nature in the sense of complete and neverending
wonder. I listen again and again to your new record, everytime
astonished how fresh the music sounds, how clear and sensual. Aleph is
simply one of your best recordings so far. So thanks a lot, Carsten.
All love from
Magnus
Magnus Haglund is writer and critic, based in Gothenburg, Sweden. |
