"It is important for me that a certain depth and variety of both exist next to each other. I am very careful not to sacrifice the one for the other"
About this Quote
A musician saying he wont trade depth for variety is really announcing a discipline: the refusal to let range become clutter, or seriousness become monotony. Coming from Alva Noto, whose work lives at the seam between glitch austerity and gallery-grade conceptual art, the line reads like a quiet manifesto against two easy temptations in contemporary culture: maximalist content dumps and minimalism-as-brand.
The phrase "exist next to each other" matters. Hes not chasing a perfect fusion where variety is dissolved into a single unified mood; hes staging a coexistence. In Noto's world, a hard digital click can sit beside a warm harmonic swell without one being forced to justify itself. Thats also a statement about listening: he trusts the audience to hold multiple registers at once, to sit with tension rather than demand a single takeaway.
The subtext is almost ethical. "Very careful" suggests craft as restraint, not just taste. Glitch music can become a sterile exercise in texture; experimental art can hide behind novelty. Noto positions himself against both pitfalls by treating variety as structure and depth as responsibility. The sentence is spare, but it carries the aesthetic of his sound: precise, controlled, suspicious of sentimentality, yet committed to complexity.
Contextually, it fits an era where algorithms reward either sameness (the endlessly streamable vibe) or shock (the attention grab). Noto is arguing for adjacency instead of compromise: multiple dimensions, held in balance, with no one dimension cashed in for easy impact.
The phrase "exist next to each other" matters. Hes not chasing a perfect fusion where variety is dissolved into a single unified mood; hes staging a coexistence. In Noto's world, a hard digital click can sit beside a warm harmonic swell without one being forced to justify itself. Thats also a statement about listening: he trusts the audience to hold multiple registers at once, to sit with tension rather than demand a single takeaway.
The subtext is almost ethical. "Very careful" suggests craft as restraint, not just taste. Glitch music can become a sterile exercise in texture; experimental art can hide behind novelty. Noto positions himself against both pitfalls by treating variety as structure and depth as responsibility. The sentence is spare, but it carries the aesthetic of his sound: precise, controlled, suspicious of sentimentality, yet committed to complexity.
Contextually, it fits an era where algorithms reward either sameness (the endlessly streamable vibe) or shock (the attention grab). Noto is arguing for adjacency instead of compromise: multiple dimensions, held in balance, with no one dimension cashed in for easy impact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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