Alva Noto on MySpace

I recently sent Raster Noton my review of their Insen Live DVD (Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto). I’d liked it and they appeared to like my review so they sent me the latest Mika Vainio and Alva Noto releases in return. I guess if I’d been critical, they wouldn’t, but I was and they did. Once I’d ripped the CDs to iTunes and copied them to my iPod, I began to listen initially to the Alva Noto CD, entitled Xerrox Vol.1. I listened to the original CD, of course. As is my wont, however, I also played it silently in the background whilst watching a DVD so that Last.fm could keep an accurate record of my listening habits. I also thought I’d see whether I could grab an image of the cover to add to iTunes to make the coverflow interface look pretty. I couldn’t find anything as it’s not out until next month. Modern listening habits – complicated enough, aren’t they?

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to express my surprise at discovering that Alva Noto has a MySpace page. As I’ve written previously, I’m no fan of MySpace, in fact I experience a sense of existential dread at the very thought of its endless banal ‘shouts’ and ‘adds’. I guess though that any musician wanting to exploit the potential of the internet must perforce undertake such base acts. Or perhaps he’s just not such a big pretentious snob as me. I know, you’re wondering why I’m wasting your time with such dull observations? Because I was really amused by how he’s managed to turn his page into an entirely characteristic minimal art space. This is particularly remarkable given the awful designs of 99.99% of the other 2 billion MySpace pages out there. Here’s a screenshot:

Bravo!
Link: Alva Noto’s MySpace page