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One thing that occupies much of time each December, then, is catching up on albums I missed, or barely listened to. Since I’m the midst of that process it seems obvious to share some thoughts, especially because the Reader‘s forthcoming best-of feature will have only top-five lists, leaving out a lot of good albums.
Last December he released his first album in three years, but since it was issued on a German label and took a few months to make it over to these shores I’m logging it as a 2006 release. Dataplex features Ikeda’s tell-tale sounds: high-frequency sine waves (your dog might be whining), tinny electronic pings, floor-rumbling bass tones, white-noise blasts, industrial hums, etc. According to Ikeda’s Web site, this album is “the first musical composition in the datamatics series—a new body of work across various media that uses data as both its material and its theme.” While Ikeda is hardly the first composer to translate digital data in sound—and with this kind of music it doesn’t strike me as a very interesting concept—the structural arrangement of the 20 pieces transcends that gambit. The disc opens with a bunch of short pieces that expose the raw data sounds, then graduates to lengthier pieces that reveal the composer’s more deliberate rhythmic ideas—where original constructions are endlessly and methodically permutated—and sonic layering. It’s still icy, ultra-precise stuff, and melody has no place in it, but Dataplex is as good as anything Ikeda has done.
