Sundaze 1613

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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 orsythe/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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This EP is Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda's contribution to the 20' to 2000 series of minimalist electronica and noise, for which the label has won awards for its design and concept. What resembles a piece of computer hardware in its oblique package is in fact an album of equally discrete and alien music. Ikeda is best-known for his self-stylized computer music, which works as much on pulse and rhythm as it does upon the architecture in which it is played, using extreme contrasts of repetitive patterns in the high and low registers. At times, his music resembles Detroit techno -- were it stripped of all tonality and texture and reduced to the absolute essentials of pure tone and rhythm. Like the Finnish post-techno duo Pan Sonic, the sounds are like pure electricity. On the eight tracks here, Ikeda alters his formula somewhat, and presents short tracks that are less geometric than the detailed design of his +/- CD, the album that secured his place as one of Japan's greatest electronic musicians of the late '90s. On 20' to 2000, the untitled pieces are noisier with a more improvisational feel, and have a gritty quality more like Fennesz or Pita than the often sterile ambience associated with the glitch music movement.

Ryoji Ikeda - 20 to 2000 EP  (flac  48mb)

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The collaboration between experimental electronica artists Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai started in 1999 with a joint performance in the New Forms series of concerts held in Leipzig, Germany. A first track appeared on the Raster-Noton compilation CD New Forms: Contemporary Electronic Music in the Context of Art. Cyclo followed a few months later. Sine waves, computer glitches, and misplaced signals come together to form interesting and surprisingly accessible glitch electronica pieces -- accessible when one considers both artists' previous efforts. Nicolai's propensity for rhythm takes the lead over Ikeda's more abstract sonic landscapes. Beat patterns arise from overlapping loops and slowly disintegrate, thanks to calculated miscalculations. The title Cyclo gives a good indication of the importance of loops in the duo's music, but one should not think these ten untitled tracks are the least static. Transformations are aplenty, surprise beat patterns lurk in the corners and demanding noises (high-pitched whines, subthreshold basses, polluting sounds) constantly challenge the listener. The last piece features only a soft ruffling noise and sounds exactly the same whether it is listened normally or while holding the "scan forward" button of the CD player. The CD is packaged in what could be described as a slot-loading box, without booklet.

Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai - Cyclo (flac 230mb)

01 C0 1:25
02 C1 5:26
03 C2 5:26
04 C3 1:09
05 C4 5:44
06 C5 2:25
07 C6 3:38
08 C7 5:18
09 C8 7:42
10 C9 3:35

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Some records are designed to provide a peculiar listening experience. You won't listen to Matrix very often (at least not the first CD -- chances are you'll listen to it only once), but you might be glad you did. Disc one contains "Matrix (For Rooms)," a 60-minute piece. The concept is simple: the two stereo channels are completely separated, each one emitting a different frequency. They start in almost-unison and develop on top of each other. These frequencies are designed to fill the listening room with sound waves and the listener is invited to create his own music by moving into the room, especially by shifting the position of his head, changing the balance between frequencies, and thus altering the sound he hears. Simply put: Since the soundwaves overlap differently at any two points of the room, if four people are in the room, each one hears different music. Listening to "Matrix (For Rooms)" with headphones would strip it of any meaning. But it is perfect for tai chi exercises and avant-garde dancers might find something very stimulating here. Disc two contains ".Matrix," a 31-minute piece. More conventional in the fact that stereo channels are not isolated, this is an avant-garde electronic piece. A light low-frequency pulse gives it structure while pure tones bounce from left to right. Each one of the ten sections is different from the previous: tempos and rhythm structures change, although tone colors remain quite the same. The whole thing feels very dry and the hypnotic stereo games and pure electronic tones can even have a sickening effect on the listener. Matrix is extreme conceptual music, something that is better experienced in a large hall than in your living room, but curious minds might want to try it.

Ryoji Ikeda - Matrix  (flac  220mb)

Matrix [For Rooms] (99-00)
101 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 12:00
102 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 5:30
103 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 4:30
104 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 5:30
105 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 4:30
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107 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 4:30
108 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5:30
109 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4:30
110 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7:57
Matrix (99-00)
201 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 3:02
202 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 2:24
203 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1:00
204 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1:27
205 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 3:34
206 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 2:42
207 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 4:55
208 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 5:22
209 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0:59
210 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 5:32

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Ryoji Ikeda deserved a prize for "surprise album of the year" in 2002. As a follow-up to the lavishly conceived sound art set Matrix, he released Op. -- as in opus. At the very bottom of the inner sleeve of the digipack is printed in tiny characters this shocking sentence: "No electronic sounds used." This album contains three acoustic works for string ensembles (quartets and nonet). The project started with a commission for "Expériences de Vol 3," part of a series of workshops organized by Art Zoyd and Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles. "Op. 1" (completed in 2001), scored for nine string players (members of the Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles ensemble), is the result of this experiment. Ikeda uses long and quiet chords, very delicate and chiselled like his most minimal electronic compositions. The effect is of violins being dragged by the waves on the shore, something very similar to some of Tibor Szemzó's works (particularly The Other Shore). This piece, here presented in four separate movements, had been released on the Sub Rosa triple set Expériences de Vol only two or three months before. "Op. 2" and "Op. 3" were recorded by a Japanese string quartet in May 2002. The second piece follows in the footsteps of the first one, but the third gets more luxurious, even expressionist, which makes it lose some of its appeal -- it evokes more conservative contemporary music. The disc is rounded up with a prototype version of "Op. 1" recorded with three members of Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles.

Ryoji Ikeda - Op (flac 184mb)

op. 1 (For 9 Strings)
01 I 2:20
02 II 4:34
03 III 4:46
04 IV 3:22
05 op. 2 (For String Quartet) 15:22
06 op. 3 (For String Quartet) 6:57
op.1 (Prototype)
07 I 2:18
08 II 4:39
09 III 3:59
10 IV 3:30

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His first full length since 2002's Op. and a supplemental piece to 2004's C4I DVD, Ryoji Ikeda's Dataplex deals with the idea of data and how it helps to shape our world. Concept framework aside this is also one of the most physically jarring pieces of sonic work in Ikeda's catalog, utilizing ultra high and low stabs of sound that are abrasive and stunning, especially on a clear sound system. These blips of sound eventually morph into rhythmic patterns that rigid, but funky in a very Kraftwerk fashion. The second in a series of audio and visual presentations, Dataplex is a promising to start to what could be one of the most ambitious projects of the post-glitch movement.

Ryoji Ikeda - Dataplex (flac 272mb)

01 data.index 1:39
02 data.simplex 1:02
03 data.duplex 0:53
04 data.triplex 1:45
05 data.multiplex 1:50
06 data.complex 0:49
07 data.hypercomplex 1:20
08 data.googolplex 0:51
09 data.microhelix 3:13
10 data.superhelix 2:28
11 data.minimax 3:09
12 data.syntax 4:17
13 data.telex 1:06
14 data.flex 2:28
15 data.reflex 4:16
16 data.convex 1:29
17 data.vertex 2:06
18 data.vortex 5:49
19 data.matrix 10:01
20 data.adaplex 5:00

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