"I try to keep a balance between conceptional or intellectual comprehension and emotional understanding"
About this Quote
In Alva Noto's world, "balance" is less a self-help ideal than a production constraint: the tightrope walk between the brain that parses systems and the body that flinches, sways, or locks in. His work lives in the borderlands of electronic minimalism, where a click can feel like a thesis statement and a bass pulse can feel like weather. The quote reads like an artist translating his own method into a simple ethic: don't let concept become homework, but don't let feeling drift into mush.
The specific intent is almost studio-practical. "Conceptional or intellectual comprehension" points to structure, rules, and a legible framework - the grid behind the sound, the visual logic behind the performance. Yet he pairs it with "emotional understanding", a phrase that dodges sentimentality. He's not promising catharsis; he's insisting that sensation counts as a form of knowing. That word "understanding" is doing quiet work, elevating feeling from raw reaction to something you can learn, refine, and design for.
Subtext: contemporary art and experimental music are often policed by two suspicious camps. One side treats rigor as a password; the other treats accessibility as a moral duty. Noto declines the purity test. He frames the tension as a balancing act, implying both are necessary and both can be engineered.
Context matters because his aesthetic - clean, precise, data-adjacent - risks being read as cold. This line is a preemptive correction: the minimal surface isn't an absence of emotion, it's a different delivery system for it.
The specific intent is almost studio-practical. "Conceptional or intellectual comprehension" points to structure, rules, and a legible framework - the grid behind the sound, the visual logic behind the performance. Yet he pairs it with "emotional understanding", a phrase that dodges sentimentality. He's not promising catharsis; he's insisting that sensation counts as a form of knowing. That word "understanding" is doing quiet work, elevating feeling from raw reaction to something you can learn, refine, and design for.
Subtext: contemporary art and experimental music are often policed by two suspicious camps. One side treats rigor as a password; the other treats accessibility as a moral duty. Noto declines the purity test. He frames the tension as a balancing act, implying both are necessary and both can be engineered.
Context matters because his aesthetic - clean, precise, data-adjacent - risks being read as cold. This line is a preemptive correction: the minimal surface isn't an absence of emotion, it's a different delivery system for it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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