Dataphonics

A star of minimalist electronica and sound art, Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966) focuses on the building blocks of sound and aural minutiae, often deploying frequencies at the very edges of human hearing―sound that, as he puts it, “the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance.” His albums +/- (1997) and Matrix (2001) spread this soundworld of sine waves and ambient glitchery to a wider audience; since then, he has exhibited and collaborated (notably with Carsten Nicolai) across the world. A homage to Musique Concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer's Solfege de l'objet sonore, Dataphonics began as a monthly broadcast on France culture's Atelier de Création Radiophonique, in which Ikeda created a highly physical auditory experience based on the idea of binary-logic data made audible, “to materialize the invisible domain of ‘totally pure digital data.'” This book and CD includes spreads of graphic scores, codes, symbols and the composition itself, recomposed from the ten segments in which it was originally conceived.