DATA PATTERNS
NO LABEL DID THINGS THE WAY WE WANTED THEM TO BE DONE. Carsten Nicolai.
Nicolai, along with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender, is one of the three founders of Raster-Noton, the minimal electronics label that, for twelve years now, has fused music with art through its sculpted sound objects and unique approach to aesthetics. The label has remained absolute in its commitment to physicality, to delivering objects of value, lovingly produced, making use of innovative design ideas, solutions and materials, while the quality of the audio product has always been a given. Earlier this year, Ryoji Ikeda (above), the arch-minimalist of Japan, resumed his relationship with the label with Test Pattern, an extraordinary album, not always easy to consume at once, but a work that, in its process particularly, perfectly reflects the stream of innovation pulsing through the digital veins of the Raster-Noton platform.
Ikeda gives nothing away. His website, for instance, is an exercise in information design, nothing more, nothing less. It’s essentially data, and data were, if you like, the instruments used by Ikeda for Test Pattern. He created a system (the test pattern) that allowed him to convert any form of data, be it audio, text-based, pictorial - whatever - into barcodes and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. All types of media are effectively standardised before the results are reconstituted as audio. Ikeda is then free to cut, splice and shift that audio into the aural experiments on the album.
The project continues Ikeda’s explorations into tomorrow’s world of digital information. How do humans perceive data? Can we hear it? Can we see it? These are the kind of questions Ikeda asks in Test Pattern. Clearly we can. Sometimes we hear it too loud; the album even comes with a warning. Because of the processes involved, bursts of digital noise occasionally occupy frequency ranges which the human ear is simply not accustomed to hearing. Don’t turn it up too loud, it says. And, fittingly for Raster-Noton, it doesn’t respond well to MP3 conversion. Keep it pure, preserve the object, buy the CD.
Clearly Test Pattern isn’t for everyone (for large chunks it’s almost entirely rhythm free), and nor is most of the Raster-Noton output. But the album and the label are, as you’d expect, heavily intertwined. Ikeda’s piece is indicative of the wider platform, endlessly fascinating, strangely peculiar, exquisitely crafted, and a futurist benchmark on the fragmented grid of electronic music.
