About

“Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto — two senior figures in experimental music—have collaborated on six albums since 2002. Glass is a recording of their live improvisation, after just one rehearsal, at the architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut, using keyboards, mixers, glass singing bowls, crotales, and the architecture itself as an instrument.

This album is one track, 36 minutes in length. More so than some less narrative styles, it demands listening from start to finish. It is a story—an experience open to interpretation; and if an album of 10 tracks with silence between is a novel with chapters, Glass is a single poem of continuous verse. It is deeply immersive. And transportive.” - XLR8R 

“There’s a resonant center to Noto and Sakamoto’s work together in which stark timbres and abstract electronics ultimately turn heart-stirring. That sense slowly arises on Glass, a site-specific performance that utilizes Johnson’s building as an instrument itself. The music’s drifting forms scan as ambient, but rather than imbue a sense of calm, Glass evokes an intensifying sense of unease it evolves. Glass bowls are rubbed with a mallet and digitally processed; ghostly tones from Sakamoto’s Sequential Circuits synthesizer waft about in space; and crotales (small tuned disks) are struck so that their high frequencies seem to hover like flying saucers. When Noto and Sakamoto introduce an even higher sound it evokes a physical sensation akin to freezing rain suddenly turning to ice, brittle and crystalline.” - Pitchfork 

“Glass works not only as a stepping stone between Noto and Sakamoto’s future works, but also as a sister work to Async, prototyping many themes and ideas found on it. Drawing inspiration from the sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia, Noto and Sakamoto take an impressionistic delve into close listening. Dreamlike to its core, sounds are amplified to their breaking point, leaving them unrecognisable. Musing on themes of existentialism, Sakamoto utilises the Glass House to its fullest extent, scraping rubber mallets across its mic’d up glass walls and producing a dread-inducing wail through digital processing.” - The Quietus  

Item Description: