Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol.1

Released in 2007 on Carsten Nicolai's own Raster-Noton label, Xerrox Vol. 1 opened the most ambitious project of Alva Noto's career, a five-volume series built entirely around the idea of the copy. Where Nicolai had spent years refining a minimal, precise "glitches and bass" aesthetic, Xerrox turned that same rigor toward a stranger question: what happens to sound when you copy a copy of a copy, over and over, until the source is unrecognizable.

Working with Christoph Brünggel, Nicolai built a custom "sample transformer" to feed the process, running everyday audio, advertising jingles, airport announcement tones, telephone hold music, film scores, through repeated cycles of degradation and reconstruction. The results bear almost no trace of their origins. Instead of the clipped, digital pulses Nicolai was known for, Xerrox Vol. 1 unfolds in long, cinematic drones that feel organic and almost orchestral, closer to a slowly decaying tape loop than a laptop composition.

The album marked a genuine turning point for Nicolai, expanding his palette from tightly controlled minimalism into something more expansive and emotionally resonant, and it set the template for a series that would stretch across nearly two decades, continuing through Xerrox Vol. 2 in 2009, Vol. 3 in 2015, Vol. 4 in 2020, and Vol. 5 in 2024. It remains one of the most distinctive entries in the Raster-Noton catalog and a key work in the broader history of German experimental electronic music.

This vinyl LP pressing brings the album's slow-building, hypnotic pieces to a format built for close, uninterrupted listening. For anyone digging into the Xerrox series or Raster-Noton's catalog, this is the essential starting point.