Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto
Insen

The other day I took the kids to the opening of a new play center. The local administrators thoughtfully (!) decided to place the rooms dedicated to children's games inside a retirement home for people who are very, very advanced in age. Curious about the place, we explored the environment populated by individuals at the edge of self-sufficiency. Ghosts to them and ghosts are we to them. No gestures, no words, no interested glances. We seemed to be inside a stunning living installation of contemporary art. More so than Vanessa Beecroft's naked models. More so than Damien Hirst's cows dissected in formaldehyde. More so than the obituary photographs of Andres Serrano. These human beings live in a limbo. They are no longer in this world and are not yet in the other. As happens to people who fall into a coma, to those who have suffered serious brain damage, and to all of us for at least an instant in our lives. Well, I find no more suitable metaphor than limbo to describe this album.

Insen. A sonic beacon destined to endure for many, many years to come. Insen means nothing in the native tongue of Alva Noto alias Carsten Nicolai, a sound designer born in Karl Marx Stadt ex-GDR. And it means nothing in the ideographic alphabet of Maestro Sakamoto.
Insen is not music as traditionally understood. And it is not yet silence, even though it feeds on the absence of sound in all its nuances. Insen is piano notes. Sudden. Insistent. Enchanting. Insen is glitch clusters at random. Unheard of. Unstable. IERATIC.

Insen is in the interval between the sense of what is called lived experience and its nonsense. An open parenthesis. Of recreated vertigoes. Of rotating abstractions. Of minimal shifts of the soul. A limbo where everything that matters floats in the air in sonic form. Limbo of past and present intimacy. An unstable limbo seemingly daunting perhaps because it has never been known before. But once inside you wish to remain impermanent. In permanent listening. Of an enlightened dialogue that sounds both ancient, contemporary, and future. Of seven impressive phrasings. And once out of the limbo, there is a desire to listen to the air. To seek the reverberations of all those vaporized emotional molecules. To seek a hand to hold. To seek the gaze of a child, who lifts his eyes to the sky, imagining the azure-white shapes of clouds. "Every colour you are."

Post Scriptum: Much more could be said about the multiple visual, sonic, and artistic activities of Carsten Nicolai, including "Vrioon," the duo's debut. As for whether the inhabitants of DeBaser are interested in all this, I have serious doubts?