Daily Noise
German artist Carsten Nicolai has turned his attention to sampling sounds from everyday urban life. It's a departure from his creations of real-time sound analysis in his collaborations in the Signal trio, Ryoji Ikeda and Ryuchi Sakamoto in 2005.
As part of the European Dream Festival, The Kitchen will present the New York premiere of Nicolai's "Xerrox." Working with two laptop computers and video projection, Nicolai transforms sampled sounds-such as elevator bells, airplane noise, department store Muzak and television advertisement melodies-into a kind of minimalist, electronic tone poem.
"The whole idea of the copy machine came to my mind," he explains. "For me, it's always been a very interesting machine. I realized that the errors that copy machines made 10 years ago are now artifacts with their own artistic language."
He decided to relate his interest in the copy machine's ability to duplicate to a notion of sound resolution that allows us to perceive the difference between noise, sound and music.
"I changed the resolution drastically to see how much resolution a sound can lose so that's it's not carrying any of the other information inside anymore. If the resolution changes are producing more noise, then it covers the original sounds. I got really interested in this process of the noise covering the other information," he explains.
Nicolai, 41, studied landscape design and architecture in Karl-Marx Stadt, East Germany, before turning his attention to sound and video art. Now, he's interested in how sounds can be manipulated through technology and specifically, how fragmented sounds can store bigger information. He applies these principles to the visual element of "Xerrox," too.
"Basically, the video projections are based on the sound analyzers. It's a very fragmented picture of pixels. These pixels are arranged according to the sounds. It's basically a complex analysis of phase, frequency, amplitude and the image itself. Sometimes it turns out to be organic, sometimes architectural. It's not a narrative," he explains.
Listening to an excerpt from "Xerrox," I became fascinated with the transformation of elevator bells into a sound like rushing water. Interludes of white noise gradually ascended into an elongated tone, ominously and forebodingly dramatic. The pealing elevator bells return at longer intervals. A hiss akin to crickets rubbing their legs together at nightfall has also been integrated into these multi-layered sounds.
"I don't really think of 'Xerrox' as a completed work," he says. "It's more of a way of how to deal with sound."