REVIEW: Alva Noto

July 3
Berlin, Germany
http://www.berghain.de/

It's safe to say that the posters pasted all over Berlin caused some neck-cricking double-takes. Alva Noto at Berghain? Cool conceptualist Carsten Nicolai on the same bill as Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos? Yes, it's all true, and when the night arrives, we don't see the clichéd image of the solemn, distant Raster-Noton artist, but instead a sweating musician thwacking beats out of his laptop-hardware combo. The sound is lush, thick, and spliced with vocal samples. Asymmetrical video projections stream at an angle down the concrete wall in a rainbow spectrum of colors while Nicolai grooves out, Ian Curtis-style — all angles and anti-rhythm.

Is this a (re)defining moment for austere, sober Raster-Noton? Yes and no. Club performances by Raster-Noton artists are rare, but they happen. When in Tokyo, they play to enthusiastic crowds at Unit, and Signal appeared on an arguably stranger Sónar bill with the Beastie Boys. But this is also a mid-week event, and mid-week, Berghain rents itself out. From Yamaha for their Tenori-On launch, to the Staatsballett, to Autechre, mid-week nights don't bear comparison with the usual Saturday adventures in shirtlessness and hedonism.

For tonight's event, German music mag De:Bug is throwing a very un-Berghain fundraiser, the lineup drawing an equally un-Berghain crowd with nary a pair of leather chaps to be seen. Hawtin, Villalobos, and Apparat are hardly Ostgut regulars, but all big-name and Berlin-based — with Shed the only token Berghain fixture. The crowd queues earlier and snakes further past the chain-link than ever, and the artists are performing gratis for what looks like an enormously successful event. The magazine has long supported the Raster-Noton cause, and so Nicolai is here to return the love as Alva Noto, an alias best known for critically acclaimed collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Nicolai's set is impressive. Unitxt, his new album as Alva Noto, is full of caustic, complex rhythms, and, in a fantastic collision of deep precision and identity flotsam, features poet Anne-James Chaton reading ephemera extracted from Nicolai's wallet. The aggression and energy in the Unitxt tracks perfectly fit the concrete bunker of Berghain, proving not only Raster-Noton's latent musicality, but also its muscularity. It's gratifying to see Nicolai's powerful set get people moving, even those waiting for bigger names.

Not everything goes right, though. The jaunty angle of the video? A mistake. Berghain doesn't usually have video; the technicians did their best. And the much-vaunted new Funktion One sound system lets Nicolai down. The volume is too low to be really bone-rattling, and the speaker stacks looming in each corner — now highlighted with blacklights (as if there was a chance of overlooking them) — have been supplemented with fillers strung front and rear, making a center-focused six-point system. Optimized for DJs and the dance floor, it lacks direction and doesn't exploit Berghain's cavernous vertical spaces.

With a door policy more lax than usual, Berghain is over-full and hot as hell by the time Villalobos takes over at 1am and the club vibe turns clubbier. The night shifts from an emphasis on Berghain's broadening mandate to something more conventional. But it's refreshing to have caught a glimpse of Nicolai's expanding horizons in the process.

-Janet Leyton-Grant