Saturday, November 29th, 2014, 11.00
RYOJI IKEDA
matrix [for rooms] I Sound Projection I Listening Room I
Afterwards: Brunch
matrix [for rooms]
CD 1 of the Double CD Release Matrix (Touch / To:44, 2001)
Awarded the Prix Ars Electronica — Digital Music & Sound Art, 2001
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°C 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
probe deeply: our relationships to time and space, sound and light. [...] The layers of sound that make
up Matrix [for rooms] 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, 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 own perception, and to our existing living spaces.
[Touch, UK, http://touchshop.org/product_info.php?products_id=240]
Ryoji Ikeda
Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics
of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical
aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly
across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical
phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations. Alongside of
pure musical activity, Ikeda has been working on long-term projects: 'datamatics' (2006-) consists of
various forms such as moving image, sculptural, sound and new media works that explore one's
potentials to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data that permeates our world. The project 'test
pattern' (2008-) has developed a system that converts any type of data — text, sounds, photos and
movies into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s, which examines the relationship between
critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception. The series 'spectra' (2001-)
are large-scale installations employing intense white light as a sculptural material and so transforming
public locations in Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona and Nagoya where versions have been installed. With
Carsten Nicolai, Ikeda works on a collaborative project 'cyclo.' (2000- ), which examines error structures
and repetitive loops in software and computer programmed music, with audiovisual modules for real-
time sound visualization, through live performance, CDs and books (Raster-noton, 2001, 2011).
http://www.ryojiikeda.com