Germany's Raster-Noton imprint has established itself as what is likely the worlds most precise meeting of design, material, visuals and sound. Materials here in a multi-media sense encompassing everything from interactive digital media installations for galleries around the world to the type of paper and fonts chosen for each musical release. At the head of this institution are the three main composers and label owners Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai, also known to a larger world as his musical pseudonym Alva Noto. Notably his profile has been assisted by recent remixes for Bjork and the collaborative project with Ryuichi Sakamoto which have both brought his sound to an audience outside of the already established audience of Raster initiates.  

Recorded over the past couple of years, this album's inception came about during the Raster-Noton tour of Japan between 2006 and 2007, only to be finally revised and edited into its current form within recent months. Of all the rhythm-based music by Alva Noto, this latest collection of tracks probably marks the greatest levels of severity, detail and an excellerated sense of propulsion. If an album like 2001's "Transform" for the now defunct Mille Plataeux label was characterised by a strict and pristine approach to minimalism and subtlety, "Unitxt" right-off is a more complex, varied, dissonant and physical exercise in precision and alignments. The essential building blocks of the Alva Noto sound remain pared down and digitally austere, but there's something uncommonly bold and visceral about Nicolai's compositional technique this time around. The album is divided into two distinct sections: after an initial sequence of ten conventional recordings, the remaining sixteen audio tracks are occupied by various kinds of data having been converted into audio information. As a combined stimulus/assault on the senses this one is powerfully engaging to the body and of equal measure disquietly thrilling to the mind. In essence the intellectual super  Euclidean puzzle-work has been made not only more mind flummoxing than the average digital precision found in the Raster blueprint, but the corporeal pleasure equation has been brought into the mix in equal measure - making for some serious mathy minimalism that rocks the body as much as the brain. Pretty much all-around incomparable, brilliant stuff.