Re-listening I- Ryoji Ikeda

...and what an amazing listening experience. And what a great idea has been to re-listen after years some of these albums. Excited of listening to Ryoji Ikeda and very impressed about how my understanding of great works and artists has changed and developed. The album cover is white, hence, what you see is actually the front page of the cd booklet.

While listening to this album I think I have tried at least 5 different sound volumes for each track to get the most out of it and get a better understanding. About the album, it was released in 1996 for Touch Records and recorded in Tokyo, Japan. For fans of Touch music or Raster Noton the sound and aesthetics resemble much closer to Raster Noton with the beat patterns and the different frequencies as in many Raster-Noton albums.

The artwork is as expected very minimalistic with white pages having the simple plus (+) and minus (-) signs. The album is as many similar minimalistic albums that you can just listen to the album without caring if there is a different track or not. However, there are sound pitches and escalations around the end of each track. The recording experience enables the listener to make difficult distinctions between sounds that can be heard in an urban setting or an album recording itself. It feels that if a sound system was hidden somewhere in a space a bunch of people would be looking to find out where this sound comes from.

The name of the album made me use the +/- of the remote control of my cd player. Try to listen to the different frequencies and tones and feeling a bit lost how to follow the speed of the sound. And while I'm writing these lines I opened the booklet of the cd and what Ryoji Ikeda is saying and is a much better presentation of this album is: "+/- has a particular sonority whose quality is determined by one's listening point in relation to the loudspeakers. Furthermore, the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening. The sound signals can be thought of in the same way as light is made spotlight. Lastly, a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware only upon its disappearance". I think I'd need at least 2-3 paragraphs to describe what Ikeda said in a few lines.


Ryoji ikeda : data.gram [nº1], 15 SEP - 2 DEC 2018, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, NL from ryoji ikeda studio on Vimeo.