Ryoji Ikeda: Dataplex

While Merzbow’s noise is accessible as a topic of discussion owing at least in part to its controversial, confrontational nature, Ryoji Ikeda’s dataplex [iTunes link] — an ultra-precise, intricately layered, minimalist audio experience — turns back any easy, let alone ready-made, discourse. In its own way it parallels Masami Akita’s efforts generally: the bits and bytes of (sound) data Ikeda uses do not lend themselves to interpretation; only in relation do they “make sense” as a work or, better, as a movement, and even then that sense takes time to form. As is pointed out:

the first eight tracks of dataplex 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.

However, any comparison to Merzbow is bound to be short-lived. Even in those first eight tracks (lasting some ten minutes) there is a marked difference, as if we are dealing with an entirely different aural medium, an entirely different psychoacoustic realm. What is in Metamorphism [iTunes link] a violent, destructive assault on the mind, is in those first eight tracks of dataplex an impersonal flow of bits and bytes of data with only the sense of a machine’s organization. And where Akita strikes down whatever structure would arise and stabilize in the maelstrom, Ikeda builds mathematical structures, both linear and fractal, from the otherwise meaningless atoms and molecules of sound. In other words, Ikeda progressively brings the “raw data” into the “cosmos of music” through an artistic arrangement of its content.

And yet, Ikeda does not remove the listener from the realm of data itself. He does not elevate or suppress the data in the way that, say, pointillists or abstract expressionists do. Perhaps a useful comparison at this point is to Alva Noto’s excellent release, For [iTunes link], where basic elements are treated, manipulated, and beautifully turned — or elevated — into aural paintings that recall everything from Blade Runner’s quieter moments and scenes from La Planète Sauvage, to advanced alien races (beloved of hard SF) blossoming into space on gossamer sails of sculpted light, to the magisters playing the glass bead game, to a meditative night alone with Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. It is not surprising that Carsten Nicolai studied landscape design. It is also not surprising that, like Ikeda, Nicolai makes art installations. It is certainly not surprising that the two artists have worked together.

But Ikeda’s work represents, it seems to me, a further step into minimalism. It is a masterfully minimalist work that is designed to strip away all but the focus of the project at hand.

The visual aesthetic vanishes, to be replaced by pure data, yet at the same time the very essence of the image transformed into an abstract but utterly precise mathematical code. [Source]

The ninth track, “data.microhelix”, takes flight from the quasi-structures of the previous seven tracks — from “data.simplex” to “data.googolplex” — all of which end with the suffix “-plex” (the first track is, naturally enough, “data.index”). This is the point at which the abstract mathematical code becomes a more aesthetically recognizable geometrical form. It is also where the genius of Ikeda’s minimalism begins to fully reveal itself. As the beats, breaks, hums and clicks roll, it might seem tempting to describe the track as techno-based, but that would be a mistake. Although there are unmistakable similarities, these are superficial, and donning a good pair of head- or earphones is enough to dispel the illusion. One moves immediately from basic math (the m-d-a-s of that old mnemonic) to complex polynomials expressed in sound, whose equations play out like beautiful aural theorems with song titles. Nine tracks farther along (”data.vortex”), Ikeda blows it all away in an astonishingly open space that I can only describe as being the perfect ambient soundtrack for the infinite light of cyberspace, into which he gradually introduces a fluttering beat and certain other sounds that virtually overwhelm the senses. But at the point where the eighteenth becomes the nineteenth track, “data.matrix”, we re-enter a more active space again, leaving the infinite array and returning to the activity of the base Arabic numerals. Into this ten-minute track the infinite is reintroduced as a background for the finite activity in the foreground. And so we have the full spectrum in flow, the full picture is revealed, and none of it is any more or less than the sum of its parts. In the final track, “data.adaplex”, Ikeda returns us to the realm of raw, almost undifferentiated, data. Final impression? Ikeda’s is the work of a virtuoso.

So, is dataplex [iTunes link] machinelike, or does the compositional effort of the artist give it a human face, as it were? As I said, Ryoji Ikeda neither elevates nor suppresses the data that he uses in his composition. In a sense, I feel that he frees the data from its implicit or ulterior use so that it may be expressed qua data-in-itself. Certainly, he chooses the keys and tones, the BPMs and arrangements. But in the execution of the work the data is revealed, as if by an electron microscope, leaving us to ponder that it can be seen as particles or waves but never both simultaneously. The sine wave only exists in motion, though any point along its length may be perfectly graphed. Deeply considered, the tracks are inevitably machinelike — owing to their computational origin and digital existence — up to the point where the listener perceives and (thereby) interprets their motion. It is the listener who will then elevate or suppress the data, or else will yield meditatively to the experience of the data-in-itself.

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Back to “Of Noise and Data, Pt. 1: ‘Noise’“