Mar 20, 2016

Sundaze 1612

Hello, those new F1 qualifying rules turned out an anticlimax, unlikely to be repeated. The result was predictable, Mercedes in front Ferrari's at a distance, all the real action was behind them where Verstappen came in 5th just before Massa and Toro Rosso teammate Sainz, looks like they might chase 3rd in the constructors championship but it's early days and the points will be distributed in a few hours time..

Today's artist is an Japanese minimalist electronic composer, a leading figure among the new crop of computer-based musicians exploring the aesthetic possibilities opened up by digital production technologies. Rhythmically, Ikeda's music is highly imaginative, exploiting beat patterns and, at times, using a variety of discrete tones and noise to create the semblance of a drum machine. His work also encroaches on the world of ambient music; many tracks on his albums are concerned with slowly evolving soundscapes, with little or no sense of pulse........N'Joy

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Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda, born in Gifu Japan in 1966, focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. Fascinated by data, light and sound, he shapes music, time and space by mathematical methods and explores these phenomena as sensation, pulling apart their physical properties to reveal their relationships with human perception. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. Since 1995, he has been intensely active through concerts, installations, and recordings, integrating sound,
acoustics and sublime imagery. He has been hailed by critics as one of the most radical and innovative contemporary
composers for his live performances, sound installations and album releases. His albums +/- (Touch, 1996), 0°C (Touch, 1998) and matrix (Touch, 2000) pioneered a new minimal world of electronic music, employing sine waves, electronic sounds, and white noise. Using computer and digital technologies to the utmost limit, his audiovisual concerts datamatics (2006 – present), C 4 I (2004 – 2007) and formula (2000 – 2006) suggest a unique orientation for our future multimedia environment and culture. His ongoing body of work, datamatics, is a long-term programme of moving image, sculptural, sound and new media works that use data as their theme and material to explore the ways in which its abstracted view of reality is used to encode, understand and control the world. In spectra II (2002), a narrow, ceiling-covered corridor fitted with strobe lights and coursed by high frequency sounds, continuously alters the visitors’ sensory experience of the space. In a later adaptation, spectra [for Terminal 5, JFK], the installation emanates an aura of almost total invisibility and inaudibility due to its intense brightness and ultra-frequencies.

In Spring 2008, Ikeda presented his first solo exhibition in Japan at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts & Media, featuring a number of works in the datamatics series including data.film, a sculptural wall installation consisting of a series of 35mm film mounted in a light box, and data.tron, an audiovisual installation where each single pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical
principle and projected onto a large screen. The exhibition premiered test pattern, an installation comprising visual patterns converted and generated from sound waveforms in real–time. Ikeda released his eighth solo album test pattern (raster-noton) in April 2008 to coincide with the exhibition.In Summer 2008, Ikeda produced a series of large-scale public realm works for Dream Amsterdam, lighting four cultural and civic spaces with intensely bright white light. This concept - spectra - was then adapted for Nuit Blanche, Paris’ all night arts festival. In this version, Ikeda installed powerful vertical beams of bright white light, and an accompanying sound installation within a grid next to Tour Montparnasse, the city’s tallest skyscraper. In June 2010, spectra formed part of Sonár / Grec Festival de Barcelona, and it was exhibited in September 2010 at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan. Ikeda intends to continue the series through  site-specific works commissioned for locations across the world. A solo exhibition of Ryoji’s work was presented at Le Laboratoire in Paris (October 2008 – January 2009). The exhibition was inspired by discussions with Harvard number theorist Benedict Gross about mathematical definitions of infinity, and took for its title the
mathematical and philosophical concept V≠L. The exhibition featured new works including a prime number, a natural number, line and spectra III.

In April 2009, Ikeda presented his largest solo exhibition to date at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. +/- [the infinite between 0 and 1] included three adaptations of a prime number / a natural number, in a series entitled the transcendental; data.film; data.matrix [no1-10], a ten- screen installation featuring video sequences from datamatics [ver.2.0]; matrix [5ch version], a pure sound installation formed by a grid of speakers through which visitors walked; and data.tron [3 SXGA+ version], a three -channel version of data.tron. A selection of these works toured to the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (February – March 2010).
data.tron [8K enhanced version] was commissioned for the Deep Space Gallery at Ars Electronica Center, Linz. It has been screened there regularly since January 2009. In September 2009 data.scan was exhibited at the Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver, followed by exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (December 2009 – April 2010), Seconde Nature Festival, Aix en Provence (June – July 2010), Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (October – November 2010). data.scan is currently showing at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow. In September 2010 Ikeda presented his first New York Exhibition, the transcendental, at the FIAF Gallery. Ikeda was back in New York in May 2011 to present the transfinite, a
new commission by the Park Avenue Armory. In the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the artist created a visual and sonic environment where visitors are immersed in projected synchronised data. The versatile range of Ikeda’s research is demonstrated by his collaborations with Carsten Nicolai on the project cyclo. and with choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballett, artist
Hiroshi Sugimoto, architect Toyo Ito and artist collective Dumb Type, among others. The first complete catalogue of Ikeda’s seminal work, formula [book + dvd] (Forma) was published in 2005. In 2009, a catalogue of +/- [the infinite between 0 and 1] was published alongside the exhibition at MOT, and provides a history of Ikeda’s work to date. In 2001, Ikeda was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica prize in the digital music category and he was short-listed for a World Technology Award in 2003, and then again in 2010.




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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."



Ryoji Ikeda - 1000 Fragments (flac 211mb)

Channel X (1985-95)
01 Testone 0:06
02 Trans-Missions 1:36
03 This Is A Recording 0:50
04 Radiorange 0:28
05 What's Wrong ? 0:58
06 Holy Wood 0:35
07 Into The Tranquility 3:04
08 All Has Been Changed 0:37
09 Abstructures 2:54
5 Zones (1994-95)
10 Zone 1 7:47
11 Zone 2 4:51
12 Zone 3 2:56
13 Zone 4 6:50
14 Zone 5 8:45
 Luxus (1993)
15 Luxus 1-3 16:18

 Ryoji Ikeda - 1000 Fragments (ogg   106mb)

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When Ryoji Ikeda's groundbreaking album +/- was released in 1996, there were very few precedents for its sparse, clean, rhythmic electronics. Composed of two suites, "Headphonics" and the title work, +/- defined the microwave or glitch genre that became relatively popular in the late 1990s. "Headphonics" starts with sine tones alternating in each channel at the same pitch, then layers different elements in each of the three sections of the piece. Each layer is clearly distinguishable, whether it is the high pitched trills, low bass tones, or the rhythmic click track. The work builds to a climax in 1/0 with arpeggiated bass rumbles and increasing volume in the background drone. The title work is really in two parts marked by the initial character in the track title. The pieces starting with "+" are based on a helicopter-like rhythm track where the overtones subtly change pitch. With the exception of a little bit of reverberation at the end of "+..," the dry rhythm track is the only element in these three pieces. By contrast, the tracks beginning with "-" are drone pieces, where the drones are layered and accompanied by sonar-like pings. In the closing moments of this second set of three pieces, the drone suddenly stops, leaving a quickening series of high-pitched tones which become quite loud. The last track is short and composed only of supersonic pitches and will be all but inaudible for most listeners. The album has none of the noisy work typical of Ikeda's later releases, but has a sparse and simplistic beauty that remains unsurpassed.



Ryoji Ikeda - + -  (flac  245mb)

Headphonics (1995-96)
01 Headphonics 0/0 3:12
02 Headphonics 0/1 3:11
03 Headphonics 1/0 4:16
+/- (1996)
04 + 2:50
05 +.5:07
06 +.10:55
07 - 6:36
08 -. 11:51
09 -.. 13:24
10 +/- 1:05

 Ryoji Ikeda - + -   (ogg   120mb)

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A dizzying, physically exhausting tour de force of rootless sonic meltdown, with acoustic samples, electronic beats, tone-based electronics and all manner of clicks, clacks, static and noise running through a digital blender and regurgitated in blasts alternately impenetrable and just barely there. Dense, difficult and enjoyably enlightening all at once.



Ryoji Ikeda - 0°C  (flac  164mb)

C (1997-8)
01 C₁::check 0:27
02 C₂::cacoepy 0:22
03 C₃::circuit 0:48
04 C₄::contexture 1:49
05 C₅::cuts 0:39
06 C₆::counterpoint 2:59
07 C₇::continuum 5:25
08 C₈::can(n)on 1:01
09 C₉::cadenza 1:22
10 C₀::coda (for T.F.) 7:19
0º (1998)
11 0º::zero degrees [1] 3:31
12 0º::zero degrees [2] 5:30
13 0º::zero degrees [3] 7:07

    (ogg    mb)

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Forty minutes of music mapped to the themes indicated in the title. "Time" is a collage of jet engines, morse code patterns and almost painfully high frequencies, while "Space" is reminiscent of Ikeda's +/-: pure, static sine waves combined slowly and to odd effect. In other words, a great introduction to the major themes of Ikeda's released work to date, and all told, some of his finest.



Ryoji Ikeda - Time and Space (flac 129mb)

Time (1996-98) 
01 1'11'' 1:11
02 2'22'' 2:22
03 3'33'' 3:33
04 4'44'' 4:44
05 5'55'' 5:55
Space (1997-98) 
06 Space 16:19

   (ogg  mb)

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Mort aux Vaches is the name of a series of albums released by the Staalplaat record label in collaboration with the Dutch radio station, VPRO. The name translates literally from French as “Death to Cows,” with “cows” being French slang for German cops - it is equivalent to “Death to Pigs” in English. The slogan originates from the bonjour Franco-Prussian War Each album in the series is a live session by a particular artist, recorded in the VPRO studios. The releases keep to the principles of Staalplaat by being packaged in a peculiar and interesting way, including using sand paper and copper. Each release is limited to around 1000 copies. This one was recorded on April 15, 1998. Commissioned by VPRO Radio 5 "De Avonden".



Ryoji Ikeda - Mort Aux Vaches (flac 146mb)

01 Headphonics (VPRO Version):: +/-  19:53
02 LSDS 15:47

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rho


I must thank you for uploading Ryoji Ikeda's stuff, I have been a fan for a while.
Again, your are the best on the Web for your generosity.

Kindest regards

Rocken : )