| Touch reissues Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda's 2001 release, Matrix, without postcards. 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° 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 deeply probe our relationships to time and space, sound and light. That's the only forewarning of what awaits you on putting the first CD into your player. The layers of sound that make up Matrix 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, and 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 our own perceptions, and to our existing living spaces. Double CD in gatefold wallet. |
