Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol.3

Eight albums into his solo career, Carsten Nicolai used Xerrox Vol. 3 to push his ongoing series in its most cinematic direction yet. Released in 2015 on Raster-Noton, the third installment traded the series' earlier austerity for something closer to widescreen film scoring, drawing inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Juan Antonio Bardem's La Isla Misteriosa y el Capitán Nemo, and the work of French filmmaker Henri Colpi. Nicolai has described the record as the soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist, and that sense of imagined narrative runs through every piece.

The Xerrox series has always been built on the idea of copying as compositional method, taking source material and running it through repeated cycles of duplication until the original is unrecognizable. On Vol. 3, that process becomes something more personal. The eleven tracks function less like sound design experiments and more like copies of memory itself, emotional data reflected back as melodic vectors and slow-building noise, closer to elegy than to the glitch-driven minimalism Nicolai built his early reputation on.

Coming six years after Xerrox Vol. 2, this volume marked a significant deepening of the series' emotional register and reaffirmed Nicolai's standing as one of German electronic music's most consistently inventive voices, expanding a project that would eventually run to five volumes across nearly two decades.

This double LP pressing gives the album's long, immersive compositions room to breathe on wax, the ideal format for a record built around slow transformation and cinematic scale. Essential for anyone following the Xerrox series from the beginning.