rfd: ryoji ikeda - matrix

I absolutely adore bernard gunter!

I will say so that his track on Mille Plateaux's Modulation and Transformation 4 "Interference 003" is one of the most amazing pieces in terms of pure sound that I've heard. Just a gradually shifting sine wave moving slowly from one tone to the next, but it's mezmerizing, esp. if you move your head in and out of your rooms "dead spots" when listening. Something along the lines of Maryanne Amacher's "third ear music" but not as dramatic.

the second disc of matrix is more like something developed out of the ideas in "headphonics." and it's great. those tiny details of sound are built into absorbing rhythms that crackle and flow excellently. i would almost say that it has something of a pop sensibility in a good way.

is that mille plateaux disc a compilation? and who, a la pinefox, are maryanne amacher and bernard gunter?

Bernhard Gunter is a composer - he makes very very very quiet music (there are both proper and frivolous generic names for it which I forget) which you need to oncentrate on absolutely to get anything out of - the concentration itself being, essentially, what you 'get out of it'. It's quite an experience - however I've never moved from the two or so tracks I've got on compilations to buying a CD. He runs the Trente Oiseaux label which releases similar stuff.

Maryanne Amacher is an installation/sound artist who records 'found' sounds - the 'noise' of empty rooms and motorway underpasses - and then treats them electronically. Apparently her work is best heard played back at head-crushing volume - much of it is designed to create weird acoustic effects that reverberate in the skull - but she has a comp cd out on Tzadik (can't remember the title, sorry Sundar) that has Merzbow-esque passages of buzzing white noise. Alan Licht calls her 'Noisy Spice'.

Another other Tzadik releases worth checking out?

Maryanne Amacher has been described well above. If you have a good stereo and you're into extreme sound, her CD is excllent. Needs to be VERY loud, and in a room for it to work properly. I feel like I've only heard it the proper way once (though I can enjoy it any time, it's still good). Some friends threw a birthday party in a large SF warehouse and I rented the sound system. I overdid it with the size and power of the set-up; it was these fridge-sized speakers and something like an 850 watt/channel amp. The next day cleaning up I brought the Amacher CD and put the system through its paces.

At high volume that "third ear" business totally freaked me out. As stated above, it feels like these minimal sine wave tones, which are arranged in a repeating pattern a la Reich, are actually originating inside your skull and pouring out through your ears. She does it with phase cancellations or something.

This thread makes me wish this kind of thing was discussed on ILM more; now want to check out Sachiko M.

http://www.japanimprov.com/sachikom/index.html

Has discography and The Wire article by Clive Bell. A loads of other stuff/artists

Hoahio (one of her sideprojects) fascinates me but I fear it is quite unfindable.

Folke Rabe - What? cd (Dexter's Cigar)

If, after listening to the above CD, your eyeballs haven't rolled up into your skull in search of your crown chakra I don't know what..
how the hell do I finish this sentence? It's preposterous. Who would want to do that with their eyeballs, anyway? Nevertheless, "What?" is the best album I ever heard that has only one note in it.

In any case, I hear ya out there with yer Bernard Gunters and yer Maryanne Amachers. Great stuff, indeed. I've yet to meet a girl who likes it, though. It's difficult to find someone who'll neck to interesting music, damn it! I have a friend who swears he'll go insane if he has to fuck to the Lilith Fair sountrack one more time, although I wouldn't go so far as that. Priorities, is what I'm saying. Still, in the dream world, sexy girls would dig nerds like me who own nine thousand dollars worth of unlistenable music.

Well, this is the end of the line for me. For those of you who don't already know about it, check out the Aquarius Records website. They've got seemingly bottomless reviews of all that is new and interesting in music, ranging from crazy Japanese noise, to Scandanavian death metal, to elephants playing instruments to recordings of ghosts. I'm not fucking kidding.

There are actually two Aquarius Records sites. One of them is not the right one, but it'll be up to you to figure it out.

That is what I have to say.

My new motto.

One
Two

maryanne amacher, two of the best concerts I've seen in my life. especially when she starts dancing like a little ghost to the arpeggios. you can try to describe the 'third ear' effect but until you've actually had it happen to you...

Eeeyow. This is pretty much the stark electronic visual equivalent of a sinus disinfectant, and that's meant as a compliment.

The DVD also contains about 8 audio only tracks of various Ikeda installations from Rotterdam to London to Tokyo to Milano to Utrecht to Frankfurt.. it begins the DVD, and it really made me think something was wrong with the DVD as there were no images to go with the extremely minimal noisy sounds, but there's a little footnote (and i stress "little") in the liner notes stating that was intentional. Essentially black screens for a large number of minutes with occasional blasts of frequency and static. Some form of digital nightmare fuel.

Wow.

I'm really happy I got this DVD, but more in the sense that I now have a WEAPON instead of a highly re-watchable entertaining multimedia experience like Dave Chapelle Season 2 or something, even this Ryoji Ikeda DVD is entertaining to me as well. Does that make sense?

when did he start doing stuff like this and is there anything else by him in this vein?

Serial music a la Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. Based on the few things I've heard in addition to Matrix, I'd really like to hear him doing less conceptual pieces and more trad musical stuff...

too late!

he's playing in london on the 20th march: http://www.forma.org.uk/current_productions/currenprod_c4i.html

This truly was the event of the year. My friend even had her purse returned the following day after losing it WITH the twenty quid still inside! This does not happen in the 'real' world.

for all the people I would have initially taken for one trick ponies, Ikeda's proving me wrong, taking it further

Op is perhaps too austere / minimal to make it through as an entire album, though listening to any of the individual pieces on the disc one at a time then stopping -- great

so no-one cares about this guy around here?

Got 'Test Pattern' last year, it's pretty good. It also comes with a warning stating that "high volume listening of the last track may cause damage to equipment and eardrums". It's annoying to have to program the CD player to skip the 16th track, so it doesn't get much play. I thought about making a copy of the album minus the last track, but never bothered.

yeah that's why I revived. I missed out on Test Pattern, tho I'm not sure it adds anything to 'Dataplex' (which blew me away). Didn't 'Dataplex' also come with a warning?

xpost: I was always curious about that (actually, I was thinking about it earlier today, presumable after see this thread title), what's the track consist of? just extremely loud bursts of ultra low/ultra high frequencies noise?

I Often forget I saw this dude performing live with Carsten Nicolai this summer, which I guess is big since I never thought I'd ever get the chance to see RI in real life.

Gave it a curious listen at low volume through a pair of crappy headphones and from what I recall it sounded similar to the rest of the album, but sped up. Very quick quiet-loud transitions.

The concept of the album being how different kinds of computer data sound when converted into audio waveforms, I guess the file he used for the last track must've had a lot of mixed 0x00s and 0xFFs.

Is _Test Pattern_ similar to Dataplex? Dataplex was great, yes, probably his best work. Everything came together really well on that one.

any opinions on the new Cyclo. album? i get the impression my speakers don't really do it justice

This record is not mastered in order to keep the original Lissajous figures and locus of cycloid movement.
To observe, please play on an xy phase scope. Any data compression such as mp3 will distort this visualization.

¯\(º o)/¯

how he doesn't pass out while standing in front of that projector is beyond me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXAevrYhicI

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicoletbn/5798139688/in/set-72157626774976905/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5NpIuEKtSU

the absolute best. i went last week

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG79ev_4FeM&hd=1

pro-tip; if you plan to play your iPod on shuffle, leave the Ryoji Ikeda albums out

haha yeah - had quite a few such "surprises" on my morning commute..

listening to disc one of matrix and have a little fan near me. if I twist my head just right it kinda feels like waves of sound are pushing through the fan and generating some kind of weird, propeller-like amplification of the fan noise. crazy!

Dataplex still rules. Playing it to piss off my annoying neighbor right now

Yeah, that's my favourite.

New one dropped a few weeks ago: ultratronics

ultratronics 01 is an absolute banger, and there's some really interesting classic late 80's/early 90's industrial music injected into the sound palette in the middle of the record, with it tailing out with a more atmospheric and ethereal sound at the end, creating a compelling journey.

Also noticed he dropped two compilations of his installation music the last couple years, one of which I was absolutely blown away by when I saw it at MONA in Tasmania a few years back (pre-pandemic): https://www.ryojiikeda.com/project/supersymmetry/

In any case, dude's still got it. Don't overlook for the EOY polls!

thanks, love his 20' to 2000 thing but haven't heard anything since "op"

I want to buy all those limited edition sets on his website but that shit is expensive.

love his 20' to 2000 thing but haven't heard anything since "op"

― sleeve, Tuesday, December 27, 2022 5:03 PM (two years ago)

this blew my mind all over again today, what a stunning achievement in both concept and execution

(the 20' to 2000 release, to be clear)