Japan's leading pioneer of the minimalist approachRYOJI IKEDA Long-awaited repress reissue of the fantastic 2005 album "dataplex"!

Since the mid-1990s, Ikeda has been active in the world of electronic and contemporary music as a pioneer of the radical and highly influential minimalist approach. His seventh solo album and first musical work in the datamatics series (a new body of work that uses data as both material and theme in a variety of media), "dataplex" represents an important and surprising evolution in Ikeda's career.

Not only does it showcase Ikeda's already unparalleled technical precision, instantaneous sound construction, and engineering abilities, but the album also features an interesting overall structure of exceptional integrity.

The first eight tracks on "dataplex" were created almost entirely from raw high-frequency data. These structures are clearly positioned outside of the musical world. Rather, these linear tracks sound as if the source code has been converted directly into an audible medium. This constant stream of data is the basic material of the album.

The subsequent tracks are longer and more complex, transforming the rhythmic structure in apparent correlation. Rhythm and tone gradually refract, and when the eighteenth track, Data.Vortex, is reached, Ikeda creates an open work that dramatically contrasts with the previous tracks, creating an infinite acoustic space.

After this caesura (intermediate pause), the album reaches an ending that seems to return to the beginning again, sinking into the data flow. This last track contains a two-bit error that is acceptable on some hi-fi systems and impossible on others. Thus, this track 20 (Data.Adaplex) not only provides an opportunity to test the stereo quality and reliability of the listener's own stereo, but also demonstrates the potential for clever digital signal manipulation.

Ikeda's extreme attention to detail and endlessly minimalist moves like these expand and enhance his own sound design and successfully show listeners new territory. While "dataplex" paves the way for pure musical abstraction, it is also a complex, original, and elegant composition by a single artist.

There is a mystery to the whole of "dataplex. Unraveling the mystery requires individual investigation and discovery. The pioneering nature of this long-awaited release is confirmed by the fact that it seems to defy proper definition, explanation, or comparison.

Datamatics. "dataplex" is the first musical work in the Datamatics series, a new body of work in which Ikeda uses data itself to explore the artistic possibilities of data, from its transparency to its materiality, from hypervelocity to hyperdiffusion. This project attempts to derive the unique universality of data, hidden in the vast ocean of data, from DNA to the everyday world to the universe to pure mathematics.