Philip Johnson's Glass House served as more than a venue for Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto's 2016 improvisation — it became the instrument itself. Contact microphones placed on the glass walls captured vibrations, transforming the structure into a resonant body. The resulting album, released in 2018, documents a single 37-minute performance where architectural space and electronic processing merge.

The collaboration marked their first live work together since Sakamoto's cancer diagnosis in 2014. Both artists approached the session with minimal rehearsal, spending only one day preparing before the recording. Sakamoto brought a keyboard and glass singing bowls, while Nicolai contributed his characteristic digital processing. However, the true voice emerged from the building itself.

Yayoi Kusama's installation — Dots Obsession: Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope — occupied the space during the performance. Sakamoto described looking through the glass walls at the landscape while surrounded by Kusama's dots as "a strange mixture of natural, nature, and artificial things, art." That tension between organic and synthetic pervades the recording. Nicolai's glitches and static rest against Sakamoto's melodic fragments, neither dominating.

The Glass House's transparent walls offered ideal conditions for an experiment in architectural acoustics. Therefore, what emerged was not merely electronic music performed in a space, but music generated from the space itself — a document of place as much as performance.

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