The Chemnitz label that made glitch into a laboratory science, where clicks, sine tones and silence are arranged with a precision indistinguishable from design.
Raster-Noton is the German electronic label the Bureau files at Tier III, an adjacent imprint at the electronic edge of the catalogue. It formed in 1999 from the merger of two short-lived mid-1990s labels, Rastermusik and Noton, and gave itself the full subtitle "archiv für ton und nichtton", an archive for tone and non-tone, which is as good a description of the music as any: clicks, sine tones, pulses, static and silence, arranged with laboratory exactness.
It is run by Carsten Nicolai, who works in galleries as the artist Alva Noto, with Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider, and the three treat the label as a single design-led project where sleeve, type, concept and sound are inseparable. The result is the clean, clinical, beautiful pole of glitch, set against the theory-driven sprawl of Mille Plateaux; the two are routinely named together, with a-Musik, as Germany's leading experimental-electronic labels.
The Bureau files it at the same edge as Mille Plateaux and Editions Mego: glitch and minimal electronics are adjacent to the industrial-noise tradition rather than inside it, but the documentary case is clear.
The Bureau's reading. Raster-Noton is filed at Tier III as a leading glitch and minimal-electronic imprint.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene