Information as microcosm of the universe. Such a notion has been at the bedrock of Nicolai's music for some time, and Unitxt, like a fly invariably drawn to artificial light, again tends to its potentialization. It's a return not without warrant, nor, for that matter, endearing result. An array of effects are drawn from this malign transcription of software applications such as Excel, Word, and so on into audio information.
Previous endeavors in this vein seemed more under the allure of the 'technologically sweet', of all that is pristine and perfect. Unitxt is anything but. Rather than feigning the neutral and inane, its logic bears out a prodigious artifice. In disavowing music as such Noto tends to its continuation; and, in fact, his act of transcribing computer programs into raw sound data proves a most expansive, flexible, and versatile platform for the expression of certain ideas - ideas which other more linear and self-obedient musical forms would simply be all but incapable of ventilating.
In like manner, the use of a compact, deadpan delivery, far from proving aseptic or willfully opaque, ensures that the ensuing works are sensuous and immediate, even at times overwhelming as they offer access to levels of reflexive response where, emphatically, one hears the intrinsic characteristics of data and marvels at their musicality.
Selections such as "u_07" are a rigid storm of stabs and squelches. If the rhythm is a little limp, it's deceptive, disingenuous simplicity and effortless lucidity ensures that quantity comes to eventually equal quality, as the latter few minutes bulge and brim with an electricity that has been gathering just below the radar all the while.
There's also a nearly machine gun speed and precision to latter tracks. Without being abandoned, the rigid structure is fragmented in favor of looser soundscapes where a crackling range of tones and loose blasts of impacted electricity, accentuated by Anne-James Chaton's associative vocals, are held together in a subtle and complementary manner, their celerity and knuckle-head bombast rendered distinctly audible. Noto manages this process well, indeed, so well that it doesn't result in a recording that simply negotiates with his heritage - it constructs one capable of a less familiar sort of experience and expression.
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