Background
Carsten Nicolai was born on September 18, 1965 in Chemnitz, Sachsen, Germany.
Carsten Nicolai was born on September 18, 1965 in Chemnitz, Sachsen, Germany.
Carsten studied architecture and landscape design in Dresden, Germany, before pursuing art.
Carsten received his first solo gallery exhibition while studying landscape design in Dresden. In 1999 he founded the electronic music record label Raster-Noton. He has also written an opera, "Sparkie: Cage and Beyond", in collaboration with Michael Nyman. For his musical outputs, he uses the pseudonym Alva Noto. With a strong adherence to reductionism, he leads his sound experiments into the field of electronic music creating his own code of signs, acoustics, and visual symbols. His diverse musical projects include remarkable collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ryoji Ikeda, Blixa Bargeld or Mika Vainio. Nicolai toured extensively as Alva Noto through Europe, Asia, South America and the US. Among others, he performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of modern art, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London. Most recently Nicolai scored the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest film, "The Revenant", which has been nominated for a Golden Globe, Bafta, and Critics Choice award.
Carsten Nicolai also works as a visual artist. Using the principles of Cymatics he often visualizes sound. In 2013, he participated as a visual artist in "Noise", an official collateral show of the 55th Venice Biennale of Art. He is part of an artist generation who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art, and science. Influenced by scientific reference systems, Nicolai often engages mathematic patterns such as grids and codes, as well as error, random and self-organizing structures. Nicolai has performed and created installations in many of the world's most prestigious spaces including the Guggenheim, New York, the SF MoMA, Modern Art Oxford, NTT Tokyo, Tate Modern and Venice Biennale, Italy. As a member and co-founder of the Raster-Noton label, he was responsible for the acclaimed CD series 20 to 2000 that went on to win the Golden Nica prize at Prix Ars Electronica in 2000.
time..dot
raster gradient
funken
static
inver
sign
visuelles feld
portrait
bitwave
grid index
realistic
atem
polar (in collaboration with marko peljhan)
milch
moiré schatten
void
frozen water
cluster
konstrukt
moiré glas
aoyama spaces, models for a performance of light and sound
static balance
pionier i
anti
In his work, Carsten seeks to overcome the separation of the sensory perceptions of man by making scientific phenomena like sound and light frequencies perceivable for both eyes and ears.
He is a member and co-founder of the Raster-Noton label.
Nicolai is also a member of the music groups Diamond Version, Signal, Cyclo, ANBB, and Alva Noto with Ryuichi Sakamoto with whom he composed the score for the 2015 film "The Revenant."