The Perfect Storm

"Numbers have lost none of their mystical glamour" Henri Lefebvre, The Critique Of Everyday "Basically, to believe in mathematics you have to believe in God," says Carsten Nicolai, gesturing at the landscape before us. "You have to believe that something is creating all this that it all has a certain mathematical purity. Mathematics is just something that we use to give the world expression we want to know how the world functions. For me mathematics is one of the best philosophical ideas, because it is a really complex system of numbers and what you can do with them. But it does not exist in nature at all, it is just an abstract idea of how nature functions. It is quite amazing."

We are walking through London's Hyde Park on a cold, sunny autumn afternoon. Even within the park's geometry, order is quietly undermined by small but insistent microhabitats that stubbornly refuse to conform to the plan. Nicolai, who worked as a landscape gardener in lieu of his compulsory German national military service before art college, has been admiring unusual varieties of chestnut trees. He points beyond them at a large open area and explains how it inverts the rest of the park's cycle. It is muddy during the winter because of poor drainage, but during the summer the damp ground will make the grass is more fecund than anywhere else. This analogy to the relationship between what Nicolai describes as "the beauty of numbers and the beauty of irregularity within order" is one of the cornerstones of his work as a sound and visual artist. It is irregularity in relation to order that fascinates him, hence his view that "the problem of mathematics, normal mathematics, is there is no room for mistakes. If you make mistakes you invalidate the process and can't follow the logic any more. Logic cannot accommodate mistakes and that is the big difference between maths and nature."

Whenever a discipline as absolute as mathematics fails to completely account for a phenomenon, the discrepancy takes on an almost spellbinding power. This mystique is key to Nicolai's fascination with scientific and mathematical processes. It is also the reason he constantly returns to the kinds of empirical experiments that lurked in the recesses of Thomas Edison's garage. Edison harnessed the power of electricity in his inventions, including the lightbulb and the phonograph, making him something of a magus for anyone interested in electronic arts. These inventions are the ancestral root of Nicolai's fascination with using electricity to reveal invisible and inaudible phenomena. Carsten Nicolai is the public face and spokesman of the extravagantly named Raster-Noton Archiv Für Ton und Nichtton, the minimal electronics label that was officially founded in 1999 with longstanding colleagues Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender. Like Mego, it's an artist-run label without a fixed roster; rather, it has a fluctuating attendance around a core of artists who often release across a broad swathe of likeminded labels. "The label is a space," says Nicolai, "which is the reason we give it the subtitle 'archive for sound and non-sound'. Basically, you create a space in between this polarity and it is a space that we need. It is a platform, and that platform has to grow with us." Nicolai's tonal electronics are released under the moniker Noto, his more textured pop alter ego is alva.noto (Alva being Edison's middle name), and Cyclo is his mutating loops collaboration with Japanese archminimalist Ryoji Ikeda. Komet is Bretschneider's crystalline rhythms project (his own-name material is exclusively licensed to Mille Plateaux), while Bender's propensity for rhythms, filter sweeps and test tone experiments is released as Byetone his debut album Feld has just come out on Bine Music. All these elements come together in the Raster-Noton 'supergroup' Signal, whose only recording is the excellent Centrum (2000). Each Signal track serves as a prism that refracts each member's approaches. Raster-Noton evenings, according to Bretschneider, consist of "our three solo performances, then [we] come together for the Signal project. Some things are fixed on the computer, but we try to improvise a bit as well, both for the sound and visuals."

All three grew up in the East German city of Chemnitz when it was still known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, where Bender and Bretschneider were in AG Geige, the only group in town. Bender is still based near Chemnitz and runs Raster-Noton's operations from an ancient farmhouse on top of a hill. Nicolai spent the mid-90s shuttling between Chemnitz and New York and moved to Berlin permanently in 1999, followed a year later by Bretschneider.

Some time after our discussion in Hyde Park, I am sitting with Nicolai in his Berlin apartment. Bretschneider and Bender soon arrive, but Nicolai is the most loquacious, happy to translate, expand on, and occasionally correct the others' statements. "Chemnitz is a small town," Bretschneider states. Nicolai adds that while they didn't know each other personally, they all knew who each other were "just by seeing each other from going to the same clubs, the same places". Amid the tumult of the Berlin Wall coming down and in a diminishing market for Residents-influenced punk outfits from the East, AG Geige was shelved. "It was the time of reunification," remembers Bretschneider, "and we didn't have an audience because everyone went to see the bands they had missed for their whole lifetime. It was also a time when we had to redefine our lives. We had a lot of equipment when the band split and it was also the first time we had a really good rehearsal room. We had a good situation to do music but no band. Olaf and Jan [Kummer, AG Geige's singer] opened a record store, then Olaf worked for Indigo distribution, but on the weekend we met up and did some music together. With AG Geige I was always making my own experimental stuff, using tapes, and loops that were really long, like ten metres a whole room full of machines." After a couple of years holed up in the studio, Bretschneider had plenty of solo material but its microscopic detail was out of sync with the booming German Techno scene. Rastermusic began in 1996 as a small, self-produced CD-R label for his quiet, minimal electronics.

Listening to the 1997 'compilation' Produkt. Stretch, there is no mistaking Bretschneider's role as the main musical force in the early days. The relationship between sound and space in Bretschneider's taut rhythms, where the manipulation of abstract sounds and pitches takes place in a controlled clinical soundscape, makes sense in relation to the label's name. By calling themselves Rastermusic, Bretschneider and Bender clearly stated that their interests were visual as well as sonic. A raster is the tiny space between pixels, the interstitial fabric of digital imagery. "We were graphic designers," he says, "so we had a lot to do with raster points which we were working with on the screen every day, so for us it was a nice idea because the music we did also completely on the computer. And because you can divide the rhythm into rasters, you have units and you can measure."