CARSTEN NICOLAI AKA ALVA NOTO

Biography

Carsten Nicolai is a German artist and musician based in Berlin. For his musical outputs he uses the pseudonym Alva Noto. Born 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt he is part of an artist generation who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art and science. 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.

Diverse  musical projects include remarkable collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ryoji Ikeda (cyclo), 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. Nicolai scored the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 'The Revenant’. The score was nominated for a Golden Globe, BAFTA, Grammy and Critics Choice Award. He also created the sound design for Iñárritu’s groundbreaking VR project “Carne y Arena”. For his film music for Marc Wiese's "This Stolen Country of Mine", Carsten Nicolai received the German Documentary Film Music Award 2022. 

“The Landscape and the Fury”, directed by Nicole Vögele and set to music by Carsten Nicolai, won the Grand Jury Prize in the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Réel Nyon and was part of the Documentary Film Selection for a European Film Award 2024.

His musical œuvre echoes in his work as a visual artist. Carsten Nicolai seeks to overcome the separation of the sensory perceptions of man by making scientific phenomenons like sound and light frequencies perceivable for both eyes and ears. His installations have a minimalistic aesthetic that by its elegance and consistency is highly intriguing. After his participation in important international exhibitions like documenta X and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale, Nicolai’s works were shown worldwide in extensive solo and group exhibitions.