Record Label Samplers: A1 Raster-Noton Archiv 1

The late 90s/early 00s witnessed the breakthrough of the minimal electronic/glitch/clicks+cuts genre. Well, for some values of “breakthrough”: I think you had a perfume ad that used music by Oval? And that was probably it, commercially.

Giorgio Armani - Acqua di Gio - Larry Scott

But! Raster-Noton (along with Touch) dropped a lot of music associated with the genre, and this record sampler almost perfectly encapsulates what was so fascinating about it all.

While I think there’s an audience crossover with noise, the music here is distinctly different from that genre. It’s not abrasive, but instead thoughtful and (dare I say it) pretty.

Archiv für Ton und Nichtton (one half of the label, sort of) was a perfect name for the thing, and look at the packaging: Anti static bags. Eh? Eh?

I guess Alva Noto is the most famous performer here (perhaps through his many collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto), along with Ryoji Ikeda… And of course William Basinski these days.

But this sampler feels like more than just a random sampler — it got the flow of a “real” album. It’s also a snapshot of a particular time in history. I used to listen to it all the time, but then I sorta forgot.

And it also worked well as a sampler in that it made me buy albums from almost all of the acts featured.

 03:45 ø+Noto - Mikro Makro
 05:56 Pixel - Scrapple from the Apple
 04:14 Senking - Lift
 04:38 Coh - Silence is Golden
 08:40 Robert Lippock - Close
 06:35 W. Basinski - Shortwave Music
 05:21 Lima - Versions
 00:51 Signal - Lines
 05:17 Cyclo - C7
 00:12 Ryoji Ikeda - 0'12''32
 00:12 Rjoji Ikeda - 0'12''34
 00:39 Signal - Waves
 03:22 Byetone - Oacis
 04:31 M. Akiyama - Arteial
 04:29 Komet - Band
 04:25 Noto - Time Dot
 05:54 Signal - Spiral
 04:55 Noto - Mm

Full album here, and some individual tracks:

Scrapple from the Apple

COH & COIL -- Silence Is Golden

Close (2024 Remaster)

William Basinski - Shortwavemusic (Raster-Noton)

Carsten Nicolai & Ryoji Ikeda (Cyclo.) - C7

Mitchell Akiyama - Temporary Music (Full Album) [2002]

Various Artists - Raster-Noton. Oacis [2000]

Noto - Time..Dot [20' To 2000: September] (1999) [MiniMax CD]

Signal - "Spiral" - A1. Raster-Noton. Archiv 1 - 2004

This blog post is part of the Record Label Samplers series.

Book Club 2025: Katten stryker seg inntil oss by Kjersti Ericsson

This is a short chapbook — just 44 pages. I’ve read at least one of Ericsson’s poetry collections before, and I remember it being quite good? I bought this extremely cheap at a sale in the late 90s, though, and never got around to reading it. That’s what happens with books I buy on sale, I guess.

I saw somebody on Twitter saying something like “never let reading get in the way of buying more books” yesterday, and I totally agree.

And this is really good. Mostly very short poems, but many of them pack a punch.

And there’s also funny ones, like this one about the Norwegian Cultural Inheritance — learning to ski.

I like the collection a lot.

Katten stryker seg inntil oss (1993) by Kjersti Ericsson (3.00 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Frestelsernas berg by Jonas Gardell

I bought this at a sale in the late 90s, and of course I never read it. Until now.

Jonas Gardell is a Swedish… er… stand up comic? Who perhaps pioneered that “stand up, but tells horrible stories” thing that became a bigger thing a few years back, so I guess he was a pioneer.

From what I remember from the 90s, his shows were pretty successful? I mean, I just saw a couple on TV…

And this book is written very much in the tenor I remember his shows used to utilise: Everything is cranked to 11 all the time. Not a single sentence passes by without Max Pathos.

And short sentences and short paragraphs.

But I don’t think it really works on paper. It reads almost like a parody of a really intense book: Everything is miserable, and one horrible thing after another happens. And also: Religious damage. I lasted until page 95, and then I decided that I wasn’t really interested in reading the rest, so I ditched the book.

But I mean, it’s not all bad — I liked the parts where the hateful relatives exchanged letters with each other. (The book deals with, among other things, a conflict filled inheritance.) It’s got nerve, but it’s just too much.

And… many parts just feels like bullshit. Like the evil, evil, evil (divorced) father that had to pay child support, but took out loans to do so, and saw to it that his estate had nothing but those loans in it when he died. So his children inherited just his debt, and had to pay it all. Mua ha ha ha *twists moustache* I just kinda doubt that’s something that can happen in Swedish inheritance law — that you can inherit debt if you don’t want to.

You can probably take over the estate, debts and all, but if there’s just debts (like it was in this case), it just seems unlikely. But I don’t know Swedish inheritance laws. Let’s see…

Yeah, it’s bullshit:

Nej, enligt svensk lag ärver du inte skulder.

Fristelsenes fjell (1995) by Jonas Gardell (3.39 on Goodreads)

A web duhsigner’s work is never done

kwakk.info (the web site for comics research) has always supported phrase searches, but it’s been really sloppy in how it marks the matches on the screen. (See above.) Because I’m lazy.

But today I finally pulled myself together and spent an hour on this, and tada:

So many details… And speaking of details, while I was at it, I also fixed marking of accented characters, which didn’t work before:

Oh, and contractions should also be marked correctly now:

The actual searches haven’t changed — they’ve always worked fine, I think. I’ve just changed how they’re displayed.

Most old magazines and fanzines on kwakk.info allow paging through the entire magazine, but I thought that wouldn’t be fair for magazines that are still a going concern. I mostly avoid carry them at all on kwakk.info, but a few are unavoidable, and those are marked as “limited”. Which means that when you click on the “next page” link, it just says “nope, you nerd” or however I phrased it (I forget). But I never actually stated what was going on anywhere, which perhaps makes things more mysterious than necessary, so I’ve now made the relevant magazines’ web pages say this:

And then that link takes you to where you can buy the magazines if you want to read them.

Let’s see… did I do anything else? Yes! I added a little box from the front page to the blog articles that talk about kwakk.info, if anybody is interested in keeping up what’s being tweaked:

A web duhsigner’s work is never done, as the philosophiser said.

Book Club 2025: A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I bought this a couple years ago — I was in New York and thought it’d be fun to go down to Coney Island and read this book. Such conceptual! So I went to the Strand and got a copy and then we went down there, and… I kinda forgot to read it.

And… reading it now, I’m not really that taken with it. I know, it’s sold more than a million copies, which has to be some kind of record, I guess. I do like the conscious “hipsterness” of it all — daddy-o and cats — but perhaps you had to be there or something? I can totally see how many of these could have felt very on point (and daring, perhaps) in the 50s.

But many of these are just pure cornball.

(Not that I’m in any way shape or form qualified to talk about poetry.) I did like a few of the poems, like this one:

Wistful. Or this one:

Funny, and it’s about Manhattan, which is always a plus.

I’ve read most of the beat poets by now (but it’s been a while with the rest), and either my tastes have changed, or this isn’t as strong as, say, Howl, to take a random example.

A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (buy new, buy used, 4.16 on Goodreads)