Byetone - Welcome to Littlebig
December 02, 2011
BIOGRAPHY
Byetone (Raster Noton) live @ MNAC from veioza arte on Vimeo.
Olaf Bender ́s experimental film work began when he was a scholar. The chance discovery of some 16mm film equipment sparked an abiding passion for film both as a medium and as a material. In his early works, constrained by technical limitations, he created geometrical shapes by scratching the images directly on the film itself to create simple patterns of motion.
These early works brought him into contact with the underground group AG-Geige, who he joined permanently in 1988. His time with this group exposed him to the possibilities of sound in art, specifically those offered by computers for artists, like himself, with a strong interest in music, but without formal training.
When the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, Bender was working for a music distributor. His experiences there gave him the idea of starting his own music label, to distribute the electronic sounds that were close to his own heart and, in 1996, he started Rastermusic with friend and collaborator Frank Bretschneider. Along with giving a platform to electronic artists working in the same genre, Benders and Bretschneider sought to forge a new aesthetic, with artwork that reflected the unique processes used in the creation of electronic experimental music.
One of the earliest releases of Rastermusic was Project Produkt, later Signal, featuring Bender, Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai, a musician and proprietor of the Noton label. Project Signal continues as a musical collaboration to this day and, in 1999, the two labels merged to form the Raster-Noton imprint.
Today, Olaf Bender is responsible for the management of Raster-Noton and is also one of the main graphic designer and publicist for the label. He performs as a solo musician under the moniker bye tone.
PERFORMANCE
Byetone ́s live-sets are rather aiming towards the club imbued with archaic beats, feedbacks associated to guitars and extreme frequencies. He creates a hypnotic trip by combining sound and real-time visualizations which should act as light effects and abstract logos. It ́s a dynamic work of art that overcomes the traditional difficulties of performing electronic music for a live audience.
Byetone creates his music digitally, using sine waves to weave a complex sonic fabric, accented by clicks and effects, taking the listener to an alternate sonic reality, where the rules of the physical world are forgotten.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
(...) "In the first place my music of course should trigger the physical impulse to dance. My visuals also target on a corresponding physical experience – on the retina – to further stimulate the musical impact with rhythmic changes of light and dark. Thus I try to avoid complexity by promoting a comprehensible real-time interchange of visual and musical language".
15 YEARS RASTER-NOTON 2011
raster-noton - german artistic platform since 1996.
originally founded by olaf bender, frank bretschneider and carsten nicolai in 1996, raster- noton soon evolved to an internationally renowned and well accounted network of artistic positions in the fields of electronic music, minimal design, experiment and art.
over the last decade the catalogue reads extremely exciting: in addition to releases by its protagonists – carsten nicolai a.k.a. alva noto / olaf bender a.k.a. byetone / frank bretschneider a.k.a. komet and all of them together as signal – there are quite a few well- known artists and collaborations involved such as cosey fanny tutti, ryoji ikeda (cyclo.), wolfgang voigt, elph, max ernst, mika vainio (pan sonic, Ø), carl michael von hausswolf, blir (snd), william basinski, ryuichi sakamoto and many more. besides, the label has been well acclaimed for its fetish artwork, its showcases and ‘temporary spaces’, for which they also have received several awards.
BYETONE_live [sónar.09] from centset on Vimeo.
Contact > marcus{at}littlebig.org.uk
Permalink | December 02, 2011
