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Primarily recording under the name Alva Noto, German audiovisual artist Carsten Nicolai is one of glitch music's most innovative and respected figures. Known for his visual works and installations as well as his audio releases and multimedia performances, his work explores a minimalist aesthetic, focusing on basic sine waves or light patterns that are often arranged into intensely complex sequences, as heard on releases like Transform (2001) and Unitxt (2008). Other recordings, particularly the Xerrox series, focus on ambient and drone compositions. As Alva Noto, Nicolai has collaborated with a wide range of other musicians, including Scanner, Iggy Pop, Mika Vainio, and most notably, Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom he has released several albums, including the acclaimed soundtrack to the 2015 film The Revenant. Nicolai is the founder of the Noton label, which merged with Olaf Bender's Rastermusic to form Raster-Noton for two decades before the labels split in 2017.

Born in the East German city of Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1965, Nicolai first studied architecture and landscape design before pursuing an interest in the theoretical properties of sound and space. Resettling in Berlin in the early '90s, Nicolai founded the experimental music label Noton.Archiv Fuer Ton Und Nichtton as a platform for his conceptual and experimental musical concerns. After debuting with a 1995 LP released as a private press for one of his own exhibitions, Nicolai adopted the Noto pseudonym in 1996, releasing several CDs and vinyl EPs of sparse, hypnotic clicks and cuts. Some of these recordings were split releases with Rastermusic, leading to the formation of Raster-Noton in 1999. During that year, the label released 20' to 2000, a monthly series of 20-minute CDs intended to interpret the final 20 minutes of the 20th century.

With that conceptual masterwork out of the way, Nicolai expanded his moniker to Alva Noto for 2000's Prototypes (Mille Plateaux), a 50-minute album of untitled sound collages constructed from the actual sound of electrical hums and clicks, amplified and arranged into a series of discrete movements that move beyond mere ambient music into a new realm of environmental music. Transform followed in 2001, adding a more rhythmic base to Nicolai's sonic experiments. Other releases during the year included an album with Ryoji Ikeda under the name Cyclo, the more atmospheric Opto Files (with Opiate), and Uniform, a collaboration with Scanner that was composed for an exhibit opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In 2002, Alva Noto released the first of several collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Vrioon featured soothing piano melodies from Sakamoto atop relatively subdued and accessible glitch arrangements from Nicolai. The album was a critical success and led to several further recordings and performances between the two artists. In 2004, a second collaboration with Opiate was released, and Alva Noto released a trio of particularly bracing EPs: Transrapid, Transvision, and Transspray. Insen, a second collaboration with Sakamoto, appeared in 2005, followed by Rev EP and the Insen Live DVD in 2006. Also that year, the solo release For was issued by Richard Chartier's Line imprint, consisting of previously unreleased pieces dedicated to different individuals. Xerrox, Vol. 1, an album of frayed ambient pieces, appeared in 2007, as did a self-titled album under the one-off pseudonym Aleph-1.

In 2008, Alva Noto released Unitxt, an album of intense rhythmic glitch that featured a collaboration with French sound poet Anne-James Chaton. Utp_, a live collaboration with Sakamoto and Ensemble Modern, was released as a CD and DVD the same year. Xerrox, Vol. 2 appeared in 2009, incorporating sounds produced by Sakamoto, Michael Nyman, and Stephen O'Malley. In 2010, Nicolai collaborated with vocalist Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds) under the name ANBB, producing the EP Ret Marut Handshake and full-length Mimikry. For 2 also appeared during the year.

Alva Noto's fourth full-length with Sakamoto, Summvs, appeared in 2011; the duo's entire audio output to date was also compiled as a limited five-CD box set. Nicolai's aggressive, complex solo album Univrs was also issued during the year. Décade, a collaboration with Chaton and the Ex's Andy Moor, appeared in 2012. The same year also saw the debut of Diamond Version, a collaboration with Bender that presented a more accessible, even danceable iteration of the Raster-Noton aesthetic. Signed to Mute, the duo released five EPs during 2012-2013, followed by the 2014 full-length CI, which included guest vocals from Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, Kyoka, and Leslie Winer.

Nicolai returned to solo work as Alva Noto with 2015's Xerrox, Vol. 3. Along with Sakamoto and Bryce Dessner, he composed music for the hit film The Revenant; the score was eventually nominated for Best Original Score at the 2016 Golden Globe Awards and Best Film Music at the 2016 British Academy Film Awards. Leaves of Grass, an EP featuring spoken word pieces by Iggy Pop and additional music by Tarwater, was released by Morr Music in early 2016.

Raster-Noton dissolved in May of 2017, with Bender running the Raster label (and handling the R-N back catalog) and Nicolai maintaining his own back catalog, in addition to releasing new releases, as Noton. Three Alva Noto releases appeared on the label near the beginning of 2018: Live 2002 (with Vainio and Ikeda), Glass (with Sakamoto), and the solo album Unieqav. 2019's Two: Live at the Sydney Opera House chronicled a 2018 performance with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Alphabet, an additional collaboration with Chaton, also appeared in 2019. Alva Noto released an ambient cover of the Cure's "A Forest," as well as the full-length Xerrox, Vol. 4, in 2020. HYbr:ID I was released in 2021. ~ Paul Simpson & Stewart Mason

Combining classical discipline with the inventive spirit of electronic music, Max Richter speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life with evocative elegance. On early masterworks such as 2002's Memoryhouse and 2003's The Blue Notebooks, the composer and producer united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans. Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work, Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners. 2012's Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including Ad Astra (2019); television series like Invasion (2021); and stage productions including Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), both projects with Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings -- which he revisited on 2024's In a Landscape -- was as influential as it was innovative, paving the way for artists such as Nico Muhly and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on Richter. The Clash, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk, Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with Luciano Berio.

He then became a founding member of the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on 1996's Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.

Richter's own work evolved from the Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later, Richter made his FatCat debut with The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt.

In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.

Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of Richter's most popular albums, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn, McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to Richter's recomposition. Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox; and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion The Last Days on Mars. Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.

In 2014, Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats. Sleep and From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year, Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation Out of the Dark Room. That September, Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama Taboo was released.

Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like Hostiles, White Boy Rick, and Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. For his score to the August 2019 film Ad Astra, he used plasma wave data from NASA's Voyager Interstellar Mission played by a custom virtual instrument as an element of his compositions (two years later, the score earned Richter his first Grammy nomination). That October, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for Sleep.

Richter continued to expand on Sleep in 2020, first with the documentary Max Richter's Sleep, which premiered in North America at that year's Sundance Film Festival, and later with an app designed to help listeners use the work for focus, meditation, and rest. His other projects that year included contributions to Rudolf Buchbinder's Diabelli Variations project, music for the second season of My Brilliant Friend, and Journey CP1919, a work commissioned for the Aurora Orchestra and inspired by the discovery of the first pulsar star. July 2020 saw the release of Voices, a work combining crowd-sourced readings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a "negative orchestra" comprising eight violins, six violas, 24 cellos, 12 double basses, and a harp. A decade in the making, Voices included performances by violinist Mari Samuelsen, the choir Tenebrae, and solo soprano Grace Davidson. A second volume, Voices 2, followed in 2021. Richter additionally collaborated with Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on an album titled Exiles, which included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. He also released his score for the first season of the television series Invasion. Richter collaborated with Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on August 2021's Exiles, a ballet piece about the refugee crisis that included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. In 2022, the composer worked with McGregor once more, scoring an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet. That year, Richter also returned to The Four Seasons with The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed. Featuring violinist Elena Urioste and the Chineke! Orchestra, this version employed vintage analog synthesizers and period-accurate instruments for a rawer approach to Vivaldi's work. March 2023 saw the release of SLEEP: Tranquility Base, an EP of electronic interpretations of the original piece accompanied by remixes courtesy of Kelly Lee Owens and Alva Noto.

Richter's music for a major Mark Rothko exhibition, the Johan Renck film Spaceman, and the spy thriller TV series The Veil preceded his ninth solo album, September 2024's In a Landscape. Recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the creative space he built with his wife, award-winning visual artist Yulia Mahr, the album's balance of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, everyday moments, and life's big ideas echoed Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. Richter supported In a Landscape with a tour that included dates with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. ~ Heather Phares

Soprano Grace Davidson has cultivated a style of vocal purity that has made her a figure increasingly in demand among performing groups specializing in early music. She has also performed on numerous film soundtracks and classical crossover projects.

Davidson was born in London on November 29, 1977. She grew up in the city and attended the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the school's Early Music Prize as an undergraduate. Her teachers there were Jonathan Papp and Beatrice Unsworth. A finalist at the London Handel Festival, Davidson went on for a Master's degree at the Royal Academy. After her graduation, she began to find places in London's top early ensembles as both chorister and soloist. Davidson has been a member of The Sixteen and has appeared with the Monteverdi Choir, The English Concert, I Fagiolini, and The Tallis Scholars, among others.

The distinctive timbre of Davidson's voice has led to a demand for her talents in a variety of recording projects. As early as 2001, she appeared on the album Le Pénitencier by rocker Johnny Hallyday, and the following year, she recorded an album of Schubert lieder. In 2007, she released Grace Davidson: A Portrait with the ensemble Fiori Musicali, covering repertory from Hildegard von Bingen to Mozart. In 2010, Davidson took solos on an album of music by American choral composer Eric Whitacre, and she has collaborated in performance and on recordings with a variety of other contemporary composers, including John Rutter and Francis Pott. In 2015, she began an association with the Signum Classics label, appearing on the Seasons album that paired works by Oliver Davis and Vivaldi.

Davidson performs live as a soloist in various musical genres. She continues to appear with the early music vocal group Collegium Vocale Gent and has toured with Max Richter. Davidson made her solo debut on Signum in 2018 with a selection of Vivaldi and Handel arias, backed by the Academy of Ancient Music under Joseph Crouch. Davidson has also appeared in film and crossover classical projects, providing vocals for Howard Shore's concert version of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack and for composer Max Richter's Sleep, which she has also performed live on four continents. She has appeared on some 140 film soundtracks, including that for the 2020 film Over the Moon. Davidson has also performed frequently with classical saxophonist Christian Forshaw; the pair released their fourth album together, Historical Fiction, in 2021. The following year, Davidson appeared on the album Julie Cooper: Continuum. ~ James Manheim

Clarice Jensen's mesmerizing avant-garde cello playing has seen her work with numerous artists, from Jóhann Jóhannsson and Max Richter through to Beck and Joanna Newsom. While also being the artistic director of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Jensen has found time to release her own work, most notably 2020's The experience of repetition as death and 2022's captivating Esthesis.

Based in New York, Jensen graduated from the performing-arts institute the Juilliard School after studying under the American cellists Harvey Shapiro and Joel Krosnick. Finding her own unique sound by processing her cello through guitar pedals and electronics, her shape-shifting style caught the ears of numerous artists. Lending her talents to the likes of Jónsi, Mono, and Dustin O'Halloran, amongst others, her work could be heard on countless recordings throughout the 2010s, but it wasn't until 2018 that Jensen made her own debut with the release of For This from That Will Be Filled on Berlin-based label Miasmah. The four-track release, which included a piece co-written with Jóhann Jóhannsson, brought Jensen's unique playing style to the fore, setting her apart from the burgeoning experimental drone and neo-classical scene. The EP Drone Studies appeared the following year before she inked a deal with Fat Cat Records offshoot 130701. Although recorded in 2018, Jensen's debut for the label, The experience of repetition as death, appeared in late 2019, with the deeply personal release -- written while her mother was dying from leukemia -- earning plaudits for its encompassing sound. Alongside her own work, Jensen still found time to score for movies such as 2020's Sin Señas Particulares and 2021's No Man of God, collaborate with Max Richter and Balmorhea, and serve as artistic director of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. In late 2022, Jensen issued her third album, Esthesis. Inspired in part by the phenomena of chromesthesia -- in which sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color, movement, and shape -- the album saw Jensen adding synths, piano, and vocals to her already evocative mix of cello and electronics. ~ Rich Wilson