Browse by Artist: IKEDA, RYOJI

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	Dataplex
Label:	RASTER-NOTON (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	R-N 068CD

Repressed, originally released in 2005. Dataplex was made by leading Japanese electronic composer, Ryoji Ikeda. Since the mid-1990s, Ikeda has pioneered a radical and highly influential minimalist approach in the worlds of electronic and contemporary music. His seventh solo album and the first musical composition in the Datamatics series is a body of work across various media that uses data as both its material and its theme. Dataplex presents a significant and stunning progression in Ikeda's career. Aside from demonstrating Ikeda's unrivaled standards of technical precision, minute sound construction and engineering, the album also introduces an extraordinary and fascinating overall structure. The first eight tracks consist mostly of high-frequency raw data. Their structures are located clearly outside the cosmos of music. Instead, these linear tracks seem to be source code transformed into an audible medium; a constant stream of data, they represent the basic material of the album. The following pieces become longer, increasingly complex and distinctly inter-related, before the rhythmic structure itself metamorphoses. Rhythms and tones are refracted progressively, until, with track 18, "data.vortex," Ikeda opens up an apparently infinite acoustic space with an expansive piece that contrasts dramatically with all that precedes it. And following this caesura, the album almost ends in the way it started, sinking back into the data flow. Through meticulous attention to detail and the most minimal of gestures, Ikeda succeeds in expanding and enhancing his sound design to reveal a new universe to the listener. Dataplex opens up avenues of pure musical abstraction while simultaneously embracing complex, unique and elegant individual composition. In its entirety, Dataplex remains inscrutable; a mystery whose secrets require individual investigation and discovery. Its defiance of appropriate definition, description or comparison ultimately underpins the pioneering nature of this long-awaited release. The Datamatics series explores the aesthetic potentials of data by using data itself -- from its transparency to its materiality, from its ultra-speed to hyper-diffusion. The project derives the hidden constants of data-ness from the vast data ocean that ranges from DNA and the everyday world to the universe and pure mathematics.

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	1000 Fragments
Label:	RASTER-NOTON (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	R-N 089CD

1000 Fragments is Ryoji Ikeda's first solo album, originally released in 1995 on Ikeda's own CCI label. As early as 1995, leading Japanese computer-manipulated sound composer Ikeda started his exploratory work with digital sound design, having an inspirational impact on the founders of the Raster-Noton label. 1000 Fragments encapsulates the early parts of Ikeda's career, from the mid-'80s through the early/mid-'90s, in three different subsections: Channel X (1985-95), 5 Zones (1994-95) and Luxus (1993). An early review from www.full-albums.net characterizes 1000 Fragments as such: "The first piece, consisting of several short parts (bursts?), snaps the listener around a jumble of sound fragments from TV, NASA, radio, film, raw electronics and computer-generated tones, and so on. It's rather disorienting stuff... more like something you'd expect out of The Hafler Trio, and actually sort of out of character with the rest of the disc. As for the rest of the disc, it's taken up with two long works, which I assume involve computer-generated sound but which have the lushness one more associates with analog electronics. Both are longish ambient works, but instead of featuring static repetitive structures, these unfold in an intriguing manner, like a long, slow drive across a very sparse landscape. As opposed to the initial work here, these are definitely the 'meat' of this disc, and anyone looking for some fine ambient work with perhaps a bit of an edge would do well to check this out."

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	Test Pattern
Label:	RASTER-NOTON (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	R-N 093CD

Following 2005's Dataplex CD on Raster-Noton, Test Pattern is the second audio release in Ryoji Ikeda's multimedia project, Datamatics, an ongoing exploration of the potential to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data that permeates our world. Test Pattern acts as a system that converts any type of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. Through the conversion of raw data into digital audio files, Ikeda enables us to listen to the flow of data, creating an extraordinary and unexpected soundtrack. These sequences of data reveal a rich variety of microscopic structures which form Ikeda's raw material; working with these micro-structures, they sometimes form the basis of chronological sequences, and sometimes he focuses on their rhythmic qualities. All sounds are the result of Ikeda's manipulation of this raw data. Test Pattern aims to examine the relationship between critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception, pushing both to their absolute limits. Almost all tracks on this release are unsuitable for conversion into high-quality mp3 files. The velocity of the audio files is ultra-fast, some hundreds of frames per second, so that the album provides a performance test for the audio equipment, as well as a response test for the audience's perceptions. A sticker on the CD jacket warns of high volume listening as this may cause damage to equipment and eardrums.

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	See You At Regis Debray OST
Label:	SYNTAX
Format:	2CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	SYNTAX 20751CD

See You At Regis Debray is a film by enigmatic, boundary-challenging filmmaker CS Leigh, with a soundtrack by Japanese minimal electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda: his first work composed specifically for cinema. The film tells the story of the days Andreas Baader (one of the leaders of the German organization Red Army Faction, also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof group) spent in the Paris apartment of French intellectual Régis Debray when he went on the run from the law in Germany in 1969. Debray himself was in prison in Bolivia at the time, having been convicted of, among other things, being a comrade of Che Guevera. For a brief moment, these vastly different paths met. The film is made of ten single takes of seven to ten minutes each, shot on 35mm by the great Greek cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, with whom Leigh worked on his 2005 film Process, which was featured in the Official Selection at the Berlin International Film Festival and in over 35 films festivals and released by Tartan in the UK and in many other territories. The film's soundtrack has been created by experimental sound artist Ryoji Ikeda. This complete film soundtrack is released by Syntax as a limited edition 2CD set. For CS Leigh, releasing the complete film soundtrack is another way of making his film available to the public -- existing at once as part of a related project, though at the same time as a different experience. In this form, it is a film to "hear," with minute, humming tones and barely-perceptible clicks juxtaposed against the jarring ring of a telephone, footsteps and other human noises. The end comes to a dramatic, static-y, roaring synth climax.

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	+/-
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TO 030CD

This is the third edition of this timeless classic, originally released in 1996. Ryoji Ikeda is Japan's top avant-garde minimalist electronic composer, in the tradition of Alvin Lucier/The Hafler Trio/Bruce Gilbert/CM von Hausswolff/Panasonic, etc. +/- has a particular sonority whose quality is determined by one's listening point in relation to the loudspeakers. Furthermore, the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening. The sound signals can be thought of in the same way as spotlights. Lastly, a high frequency sound is used that the listener only becomes aware of upon its disappearance.

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	0º C
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TO 038CD

2007 repress of the second full-length by Ryoji Ikeda on Touch (originally released 2001), following the highly acclaimed +/- (1996). Recorded and mixed at CCI studio in Tokyo, this release features two works in Ikeda's continually expanding electronic style. "OºC" is an exploration at the edge of one's perception -- an extension of +/- and the next step. "C" adds a velocity axis and a density axis to factors, Oº amalgamated numbers, structures, frequencies and sounds.

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	Matrix
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	TO 044CD

Touch reissues Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda's 2001 release, Matrix, without postcards. Matrix is the final element in a trilogy of CDs that began with +/- in 1996. When it was first released, +/- came like a bolt out of the white. Nobody had used digital recording processes to produce sound as pure, as intense and as exhilarating. Since releasing 0° in 1998, Ryoji Ikeda has progressively refined and enhanced the distinctive sonic fields and microsounds that have strongly influenced post-digital composition, resisting the transitory cycle suggested by the term "glitches," creating compositions that deeply probe our relationships to time and space, sound and light. That's the only forewarning of what awaits you on putting the first CD into your player. The layers of sound that make up Matrix transform both the listener and the listening environment into another dimension. The dimensions change as you move about the space, or simply turn your head around the sound like surveying the angles of a building. Matrix has much in common with the work of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and Alvin Lucier, but, poised closer to the imminent and auto-interactive virtual world we are promised, Ryoji Ikeda's new work pushes the parameters of the drone to ask timely questions concerning our relationship to our own perceptions, and to our existing living spaces. Double CD in gatefold wallet.

Artist:	IKEDA, RYOJI
Title:	Formula
Label:	TOUCH (UK)
Format:	BOOK/DVD
Price:	$36.00
Catalog #:	TO FORMA001

"Book and DVD contained in clear plastic slip-case in numbered edition of 3000. [Book]: 186mm x 136mm, 96 pages, soft cover, with 62 full color and 34 monochrome illustrations [DVD]: features eight sound pieces from installation works and a 35-minute full video documentation of the formula [prototype] concert filmed in Tokyo. The DVD is an NTSC/PAL hybrid for world-wide use.

       This is the first complete monograph about the seminal work of Ryoji Ikeda. With superb attention to detail and layout, the publication documents the artist's latest projects and includes brand-new artwork especially produced for the book. At the same time, formula covers Ikeda's landmark concerts and installations; and his collaborations with, amongst others, celebrated artist/musician Carsten Nicolai, acclaimed performance group Dumb Type and famous architect Toyo Ito. All of the DVD content is only available here, with a 35 minute full video documentation of formula [prototype] concert filmed in Tokyo and 8 sound pieces from installation works.

       Not only the most complete Ryoji Ikeda catalogue, formula is an intimately-scaled minimalist artwork in itself, and an object of desire. How the book is held may cause the numbers and text, picked out in clear varnish on white page, to shimmer. Every aspect of look and feel has been considered by the artist's critical eye. His superlative production values are ever-present in the quality of the images and the finish. Only through repeated investigation does the publication begin to reveal its richness. Readers will be able to pore over the photographs, ponder the schematics and technical data, and enjoy the spacious listings of performances, exhibitions and releases. The artist's first-rate assembly of data, diagrams and video stills create moments of graphic intensity that make the white spaces of the pages surprisingly dynamic. The book is pure pleasure to hold.

       Formula [Book + DVD] reflects precise design and the artist's flawless selection of surfaces and materials. An exceptional publication, it provides a 'heightened sensory experience' in a similar way to his concerts, installations and sound works." Last copies of this limited item.

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page