Carsten Nicolai
«aka noto, crystals/reworked»

Performance: November 7, 2003 in conjunction with the Matrix Festival, Forum for Contemporary Music Leipzig, Location: Kunstraum B2, Leipzig

Terms such as core, crystal, snow, pole, turn, spin and loop permeate the work of the artist Carsten Nicolai. These building blocks and word constructions are what he converts to a kind of construction model for human thought processes. He forms structures and fragments taken from the areas of technical and natural science research and combines them into a new type of perceptual connection. Nicolai exhausts stimuli and influences from the basic principles of physics and biology.
Two names are to be mentioned in connection with this work: Johannes Kepler and Ernst Haeckel – Kepler for his text on mathematical numerical series, «On Six-Cornered Snow,» and Haeckel for his research on radio effects, which he called «crystal souls». These components were the incentive and starting point for <Crystal S>.
The composition/construction of the sounds, based on the feedback of resonance, produces sine-vibrations. These sounds were generated using frequency modulations, a special form of sound synthesis developed by John M. Chowing Ende in the 1960s. Superimposed over the FM-generated sounds are extremely high, no longer detectable frequencies which produce so-called indifferences. This sound-impression produces the image of a crystalline structure.
The well-known principle of frequency modulation or FM-synthesis, from the area of radio-broadcasting technology, is founded on the effect of a modulation vibration on a carrier vibration (multiplication). For the sound synthesis, one uses for both the carrier and modulator the vibration frequencies within the range of the human hearing capacity. From the humming and differential frequencies of the participating vibrations, so-called side wavelengths are produced directly from the carrier frequencies.

(Source: Matrix - Herbstfestival für klingende Kunst, Leipzig 2003, p. 61)