RYOJI IKEDA / SHIRO TAKATANI
FORMULA (2002)

Video: Shiro Takatani 
Year: 2002
Time: 65 mins
Music: Ryoji Ikeda
Eye of Sound: By the mid-90s Ikeda offered the audio world a violent, but quiet, revolution. Others would follow his trail and get all the credit, Ikeda being left with only a few crumbles of the goldmine he had located for the (often uninspired) laptop generation. Of course, the test-tone/high-pitched frequency turn in electronic music could perhaps have happened anywhere else at the time: all revolutions seem, a posteriori, to have been bound to happen, just waiting for someone to pull the first trigger. But it's probably a good thing that Ikeda was the one who first stepped in into this relatively unknown island, since his clarity, simplicity and almost eugenic approach to his materials left us with an almost complete topography of this newly-found territory, leaving copycats the burden of sheer emulation or trivialisation and forcing creative artists to push forward in new directions. Formula documents concerts and installations recorded between 1998 and 2002. The first section includes audio installations recorded in Europe and Tokyo, featuring excerpts from albums like or Matrix over a dark screen. The second section comprises a 2001 Tokyo concert in which Ikeda's gelid pulses and frequencies are synched against video-patterns designed by Dumb Type's Shiro Takatani, revisiting material from the 1996 classic +/- and other works. In their stark strobo-geometry and perception-bending force, Takatani's designs are probably the most accurate visual renditions of Ikeda's music. No matter how large your tv-set is or how clean and powerful your speakers are, this can't replace or come close to the unique experience of actually attending Ikeda performances. But if you hadn't had the chance to see and hear them in loco, the Formula collection and a bit of imagination may take you somewhere near. 
Link removed under DMCA threat

6 comments:

  1. what do you mean under threat?

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  3. private message me the links please... you can have anything in return. ANYTHING. :)

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  4. yes, me too, please, is that possible?

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  5. there is a devil in the circuit
    there is a circuit in the devil
    how will you see the devil
    if you can't see the circuit?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Damn, guess I got here too late!!

    ReplyDelete