Listening to the Radio

Raster-Noton originated as a collaboration of two independent labels: Rastermusic, founded by Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender (a.k.a. Byetone), and Noton, a project by Carsten Nicolai (a.k.a. Alva Noto). The three founders had grown up as avid collectors of experimental music - not an easy feat in times of the GDR, when Western recordings were expensive and hard to get by. Inspirations came from the likes of Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and West German radio, where they first heard the likes Meredith Monk, Steve Reich and other avant garde musicians.

Chemnitz' only professional group at the time were AG Geige. Bretschneider and Bender were two of its members. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the group dissolved, but Bretschneider continued the loop- and tape-based experiments he had already commenced when part of the group. Joined by Olaf Bender, who had started to work in music distribution, he began to release small editions of his minimalistic compositions. Carsten Nicolai had meanwhile founded his Noton.archiv für ton und nichtton, and soon the two platforms found themselves collaborating on productions and releases, fuelled by a common interest for the intersections of science, art, performance and music.

Counting and Measuring

With Bretschneider and Bender both sharing a background as graphic designers, and Nicolai firmly devoted to the conceptual and artistic side of releasing music, the visual and haptic aspect of their releases soon became an integral part of the Raster-Noton philosophy. The 'Clear' series of releases issued CDs in transparent casings, with only barely discernible lettering on the discs themselves, a packaging that soon became iconic for the label. The '20' to 2000' series meanwhile comprised twelve 20 minute long recordings on Mini CDs, one released each month during the year 1999. The elaborately packaged series featured music by artists like CoH, Scanner, Mika Vainio, Coil's ElpH and Ryoji Ikeda and was awarded the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica in 2000.

Raster-Noton's interest in the visual aspects of their music can further be observed in their highly regarded live performances, either with the owner's solo projects or the Signal super group. Reduced to a bare minimum of geometric shapes and mono-coloured stripes, video projections are generated directly from the musical input. These are perhaps most striking in the unadorned narrative told by the visuals accompanying the live sets of Olaf Bender's Byetone project: Large scale digits counting each bar of the music played, from the first until the last beat of the performance.

The reduction to pure form and numbers, offering little or no room for interpretation, seems like a logical break with a socialist past where everything was iconic and charged with political meaning. By removing all iconography, Raster-Noton strips its productions down to a bare grid ('Raster' in German), with plenty of space in between. This not only applies to Raster-Noton's packaging and visuals but first and foremost to the music, which generally eschews melodies for the exploration of precise rhythmic forms.

Crossing the Parallels

It is in this regard that Raster-Noton frequently rubs shoulders with contemporary club music, be it techno, electro or even pop music forms like R'n B; preferring the strict formality of structured patterns to the free-form improvisation common to generative music has allowed Raster-Noton to successfully navigate through both the club and art sphere in past years. Something that might be most evident in the recent productions by Olaf Bender's Byetone project: The 2008 album 'Death of a Typographer' and the accompanying single 'Plastic Star', which included remixes by Sleeparchive and Walker. The track has been proven so popular as a DJ record that Berlin's Modeselektor have recently commissioned a Byetone remix of their track 'The Black Block'.

Sticking to an established formula would however be against Raster-Noton's philosophy and recent releases bear more than a few surprises: Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project has been given a luxurious release last year, consisting of a photography book as well as a CD. The label's obsession for serialisation continues with the first edition of the 'Unum' series - industrial hip hop beats by Tokyo's NHK. Most recently Atom TM has released his album 'Liedgut' on Raster-Noton: electro-acoustic lieder in the tradition of romantic composer Franz Schubert, with Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider contributing an accapella vocoder rendition of the well known German folk song 'Es Klappert die Mühle am Rauschenden Bach'. Clatter and Noise - a fitting description of Raster-Noton's sonic blueprint.