ryoji ikeda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWhfZk1llUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIXOXs2vsV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=motMUUxmU-U i can't stop listening to his music. there's something so deeply psychedelic about it. i understand that the difference between rhythm and pitch is really just a question of time scale, but he's the first composer i've ever seen put this idea into practice. the fast clicks can start out sounding almost like a drum machine, but then he speeds them up, and they become an oscillator. it's really disorienting. on top of that, he uses pitches at the fringes of human hearing and auditory illusions. the result is music where you can't really tell how accurately you're even hearing it. how much of it is a hallucination? how much is on the recording? how much of it is too high or low to hear? anyway, i love it and think it's /cyb/ as fuarrrk. what does lain think? anybody want to recommend other things i should check out? how do you even describe this kind of music? some relevant concepts are "sound art", "microsound", "granular synthesis", and "beat patterns".

this is cool as soykaf thank you lain

Look at Ikeda's recent show in LA. Street Racers take their cars to a garage, blast sine waves for 30 minutes. fuarrrkin unforgettable. For recs: Look into microsound, glitch, EAI, more generally. the fringes of traditional music slated against technics, signal vs. noise. Zorn's Hermetic Theatre, Vladislav Delay, Bernhard Gunter, Oval - 94 Diskont, Anything Fennesz did... Ikue Mori, Pan Sonic. Links: VD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-P2YjictD0 Oval: https://youtu.be/wn8mxzDYdbE BG: https://youtu.be/QZfMp6tredw Fennesz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFksI52akk charlemagne palestine: https://youtu.be/bulibjyaQ0s OV (distilled metal): https://youtu.be/e2EGKt8yONI Xanopticon: https://youtu.be/6lWHRzwAmM8 just let go

>>1462 np, glad you like it. honestly finding out about this stuff takes me back to the first time i heard trout mask replica. the first impression is just "wait... you can fuarrrking do this? and it works?" >>1463 thank you! also... >caroliner i like you

>>1463 thinking about this more.. the ideas ikeda's using were definitely pioneered in stuff like lowercase/ambient, but those ideas work better for me when coupled with chaos and aggression. i don't really know how to explain it, so i'll just give an example from another genre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wgA9L5TN5M

>>1455 I opened the one with the barcodes, and started to scroll in looking for the music. Or any music, really. It was around 27 minutes that I heard some stuff, realizing the volume was set low. I think this kind of stuff is just one step too far. Experimental music, while obviously being the label you put on stuff that cannot be labeled any other way, is still music. You can listen to Squarepusher and even if you have no idea what is going on and your ears hurt, you can perceive that it is trying to be music, while if you get used to it and dive in, you'll find experimenting, ideas, and it will blow your brains right out of your skull. But it's music, with instruments and melody and tracks. However, Mr Ryoji here is trying so hard it's not really music anymore. Experimental as fuarrrk, but not music, rather aesthetics: it just puts all these visual, audio and conceptual things together, you have barcodes, morse code, printer and floppy disk noises, audio clipping, monotone and repetetive stuff, and the annoyance and eventual numbness that follows. I'm not trying to devalue it by saying it's not music, but it really isn't. It needs visuals of office technology and telecom, if not in pictures or a video then in your head. It's like people who need to put pictures of lain everywhere to retain their interest in compsci; while those actually interested would be bothered by the unrelated anime girl being painted all over, they just wanna see code and text. Do you even know Squarepusher?

>>1466 https://www.mp3-converter.com/mp3codec/mp3_anatomy.htm squarepusher is good but every lainon and their grandma knows who they are re-listen to dataplex, start at superhelix. it can take a while to enjoy a dense album, how you approach it makes a big difference. no point in saying it's not music

>>1467 Every lain also already listened to just enough lain noises. Read the post again, it can take a while to understand the actual meaning, how you approach it makes a big difference, no point in answering "Do you even know Squarepusher?"

>>1468 ikeda is a skilled artist both aesthetically and sonically, i couldn't care less if his music doesn't mesh with your taste, but it's nice when someone cooks a 3-course dinner for you :)

>>1469 your insistence that disagreement is just "a difference of taste" is why you'll never really understand me, ryoji, or even squarepusher. enjoy the meals, I guess.

https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/ks7ypt8ko7ks9rb5

https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/9frocax5h4435ags

So Lemme find out that dennys tried to posion me for whatever reason i have the cup lol who knows why the US Marshall Services is following me around.

with water

>>1466 OP here. not really interested in getting too deep into the "is this music" debate, since it's really up to you to define what you think music is. i usually fall back on "music = curated sound". in other words, if a human being deliberately put certain sounds in a certain order for the purpose of sonic expression, i call it music. i've also heard good arguments for music existing as an experience of sound. like, anything is music if you choose to interpret it as such. if you have a definition of music that excludes this kind of thing, that's perfectly fine. if you can explain what that definition is, and why you like to use it, that's even better... but it's the same sound if you call it music or not. if not music, how do you feel about it as non-musical audio? what do you like about it, and what don't you like about it? that's more what i was trying to get at with this thread. also, yeah i like squarepusher

>>1466 I'm not sure how this is not music, it's not even that far from squarepusher. Compared to other harsh noise albums, this has very clear rhythmic elements, and relatively "soft" sound design. I also think the whole "trying too hard" argument in relation to anything is pretty nonsensical. How can someone try too hard? If you want to make something good or interesting you have to try right? You could mean it seems contrived, I could understand that

>>1475 Well I'd say music either has to stay within at least a few rules of music theory (especially when it's alone), or have the cultural purpose of being music (e.g. people sing the anthem of their country, kids play a game while singing a song that 'leads' the game, a soundtrack accompanying some performance or video). Now, our guy here seems to be making more of an aesthetic show of industry noises around telecommunication, but the non-sound part of the show is missing. (BTW, are those lines in the third video in a symmetric relation to the sounds?) There are points where he does get pretty close to belonging within the rules of music theory, but he seems to instentionally back out when he does. If anything I'd say he wants to make noise that can under the right circumstances feel like almost music, but is not. That could be a message. >>1481 Well, just like trying too hard at "bending a branch" makes it "breaking a branch". Sqph uses and plays some musical instruments, does resemble existing genres at times, and even when he goes fuarrrk soykaf up, he doesn't pass a 80% noise 20% music ratio (though some people interpret jazz as noise). It is music by reason, and also feels like music. You don't really need to know in advance that this was supposed to be music, the latter which isn't so obvious in the case of Ryoji, where I was expecting music, but needed some reasons outside the sound to somehow justify it as such.

>>1482 >Now, our guy here seems to be making more of an aesthetic show of industry noises around telecommunication, but the non-sound part of the show is missing. i disagree with you here, although i see where you're coming from. it's not necessarily easy to figure out the technical details of what he's doing (even harder if you don't actually like the music enough to keep listening to it over and over until you figure it out). for me, there's enough interesting things going on for the audio to stand on its own. btw those aren't samples of telco equipment afaik. check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis >There are points where he does get pretty close to belonging within the rules of music theory, but he seems to instentionally back out when he does. i think you're on the money with this comment. the ambiguity here is one of the things i really like about it. with clicks and simple oscillators, he'll make something that's almost normal break-beat electro, but then he manipulates it in and out of chaos. to me, the point of it is to show how little you have to do to audio in order for it to lose its familiarity. take any recording and speed it up by a factor of thousands and all of a sudden it "isn't music" anymore. what does that say about our experience of music in general? >You don't really need to know in advance that this was supposed to be music, the latter which isn't so obvious in the case of Ryoji, where I was expecting music, but needed some reasons outside the sound to somehow justify it as such. some of this comes down to exposure. it's like if you grew up using a fork to eat without ever seeing chopsticks. the first time you're exposed to chopsticks, you won't immediately think "this is something to eat with". if none of the music you've heard before sounds like this, it will come across as unmusical. like your example with free jazz. to me, ikeda came across unambiguously as "music", but i listen to a lot of harsh noise so my perception of "musicality" is different.

>>1482 sorry for the double post. forgot to mention: >at least a few rules of music theory music theory isn't actually a set of rules. it's a descriptive language for describing compositions. if there are any "rules" to music theory, they derive from your own choice of axioms, like saying "i am writing a piece using a western equal-temperament scale". different choices of axioms produce different, equally valid, results, like euclidean vs spherical geometry in mathematics.

>>1466 Ryoji is pretty dance-able, there's a pulse to it and I can guarantee you that a DJ could easily spin it in a techno set. Listen to this: https://youtu.be/_bwavzhPoms This is Jeff Mills, from 1992. Jeff would put this bad boy in his live sets, people danced to it.

>>1486 i love that jeff mills album. some of the only detroit techno i can get into.