Alva Noto

Photo: Mutek Japan 2025/by Shigeo Gomi

At the forefront of electronic music for more than three decades, Carsten Nicolai has proved that less can indeed be more — and that also extends to the tools he uses.

The work of the German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of sound art, experimental electronic music, natural sciences and visual culture. He emerged in the 1990s as part of a new wave of experimental electronic musicians investigating the sonic residue of digital technology and software, and has been working under the musical alias of Alva Noto since 2000. Ranging from austere electronic compositions to large‑scale audiovisual installations, he has developed an artistic language that is rooted in sonic and visual minimalism, scientific curiosity, and the exploration of perception itself.

Minimal

In an era where studios can resemble aircraft cockpits, bristling with plug‑ins, multiple screens, a modular synth setup and endless options (guilty as charged), Nicolai’s studio it built around the premise that less is more. His work is proof that a reduced setup can transform the act of music making into something immediate, intimate and focused.

Minimal by nature: Carsten Nicolai’s studio is focused on the computer — ‘focused’ being the operative word.Photo: Uwe Walter

“I think, for me, the biggest and most radical thing was basically the introduction of what you are capable of in the nomadic life as an electronic musician. I was always very interested in technology that allows me to travel and to work in the same time. So, I was very interested to minimise and to maximise at the same time. When I started, I had two laptops all the time, because I needed two laptops, because they were not capable of doing everything at the same time.

When you look into my studio, you see basically four speakers, a table. There’s a little device, a soundcard, and that’s it. So, boom!

“This was for me, and still is, where I kept that goal, that I tried to keep everything super light. When you look into my studio, you see basically four speakers, a table. There’s a little device, a soundcard, and that’s it. So, boom!”

Minimal setups also dissolve the boundary between studio and world. Music can be composed on a train, in a hotel room, or while walking through a city with a portable recorder, and for many electronic musicians even the environment becomes part of the instrument. Hardware and software continue to fascinate him with equal interest, but recent developments in software have made him pause for thought.

Carsten Nicolai.“I was always very interested in these tools, in experimental tools, and in the period when I started, with both weird hardware stuff and weird software stuff, but now what I see in the moment is a little bit that everything became more and more ‘conditioned,’ if this is the right word.

“So‚ I’m missing really little experimental tools, because now everything seems to be so prepared. It offers you this ‘instant success’ feeling. When you have so many presets it can be so overwhelming, but also very tempting, of course. I think in the time when I started producing music, there’d been some big software, DAWs, digital workstations around like Logic and Cubase. And in this time, other software appeared like Fruity Loops, Native Instruments and Ableton — super tiny little companies. But I found that when I look into updates in Logic and Ableton now that I couldn’t find the menus anymore. I am concerned that the software would fail for me because the young, fresh, new design will take over. If you look into Ableton and Logic today there feels like thousands of menus, under menus, and so on.

“I also noticed how incredibly unified people produce music in these days, leading to a kind of monoculture where we’re all using the same tools and so produce, of course, something where the music sounds more and more similar. It’s really difficult to have a very radical approach of having completely different sound aesthetics.

“When Ableton came out the biggest appeal was that you could throw a loop inside, and it perfectly synchronised. But what it did was, basically, was force everybody to be in the grid. And when I listen back to my recordings, I didn’t have this opportunity to synchronise completely very well, compared to how people shuffled things on top of each other and looped, whatever. But this is such a beauty now, as it’s kind of flipped around for me, so unsynchronised stuff has much more attraction now than synchronised stuff.”

However, software rather than hardware continues to offer a sense of freedom and possibilities for Nicolai, where sound can be sculpted, stretched, fragmented and rebuilt in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Indeed, the iPad with a suite of software tools is now essential to his sonic palette.

“I have this feeling now, for instance when working with the iPad. There’s software which costs really not much money, in a way, when you compare it to hardware. There are such weird, little things that can do only one thing. I don’t use it so much for recording, but more for playing live, or reacting in live performance.

“I have this fantastic granular synthesis software called Borderlands which is really amazing. I don’t use it so much for recording, because I’m always thinking it’s not ‘me,’ but maybe sometimes I pull it out and record something. I know when I need this kind of grainy, loopy surface here behind something, but this is beautiful....