In between the concerts and events at this year’s AFEKT festival, while i was in Tartu i was able to experience the latest venture from Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda. Taking place in the spectacular Estonian National Museum, it comprised a solo exhibition and the world première of a collaboration with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Long-term readers of 5:4 will know my interest in Ikeda’s work goes back many, many years. One of my earliest articles on was a short retrospective of his output, and in the years since i’ve conducted the UK première of his string piece Op. 1, explored his audiovisual work datamatics in Birmingham and London, as well as his later forays into non-electronic music, Music for Percussion and 100 Cymbals. (Furthermore, the slogan for 5:4, “It’s the most beautiful ugly sound in the world”, comes from the start of Ikeda’s track ‘Trans-missions’ on his 1995 album 1000 Fragments.) It’s been especially interesting to hear the results of Ikeda discovering how to shape and articulate his distinctive language away from electronics. In the case of the percussion and string pieces, their emphasis on pitch and noise has formed a strong connection to the rest of his output. This new choral escapade could hardly be more different.
i have to say my doubts were raised as soon as i saw that Tõnu Kaljuste would be conducting, a man obsessed with presenting only the most cheap and undemanding repertoire to audiences who want nothing more than a soothing ear bath. It pains me – and astonishes me – to have to say this, but Ikeda’s choral works were absolute rubbish. i can’t fathom what possessed him to do it. We were confronted by a collection of eight pieces, all featuring the most twee, vaguely haiku-esque texts about birds, nature, light and dark – though this hardly mattered as the last thing Ikeda was trying to do was actually set or portray these texts. They were merely the vehicle for what was essentially a load of ersatz folk music, each one comprising some form of canon, hocket, refrain, round or variation.
This makes technical sense, inasmuch as patterns are a quintessential element in Ikeda’s output, but beyond this, the musical language was so basic – all desperately safe and unadventurous, though a better word would likely be naive – that one could sense no meaningful relationship to anything else Ikeda has created. “Cycles never end” was a phrase sung in Lux et Nox I, and this sentiment neatly encapsulated most of these songs, circling round and round with only a modicum of variety, but absolutely no trace of individuality or a unique compositional voice. It was something i’ve never encountered before at an Ikeda performance: coming away depressed from an experience a world away from the stark, brilliant, fearless originality of the rest of his output.
Mercifully – though its proximity only made the choral music seem yet more egregious – the museum is also hosting Ikeda’s latest solo exhibition. The first part of this is contained in a long corridor containing the dronally atmospheric sound installation vox aeterna (featuring voices from the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir) and the critical paths, a fast-flowing stream of data derived from research by the University of Tartu’s Institute of Genomics.
This leads to the main focus of the exhibition: the three massive screens that make up data-verse, completed in 2020, and it doesn’t take long to realise it’s essentially an expansion of the kind of thing Ikeda was exploring in datamatics. Expansion is the word; when discussing datamatics i commented on the wondrous way so many aspects of existence had been brought into Ikeda’s world and transformed into an audiovisual ballet. In data-verse, it feels as if Ikeda has taken this as far as it can go, expanded to seemingly encompass everything, embracing the literally unlimited number of things that can be measured and quantified, and making them the stuff of his sound and light extravaganza. When considering Ikeda’s work, we need to distinguish between the audio Ikeda and the audiovisual Ikeda (as well as the non-electronic Ikeda), and in the case of data-verse – in contrast to datamatics – it seems very much that Ikeda is leaning on the visuals to be the emphasis, dazzling us with details about astrononomy, anatomy, geography, geology, CCTV, circuitry, chemistry, telemetry, meteorology, and a host of other clear or cryptic facts, figures and phenomena. Musically, the range of its invention is slim – the sonics by this stage serving to accentuate and punctuate the arresting images towering in front of us – yet it was all unquestionably, quintessentially Ryoji Ikeda, and it was, as ever, spectacular.
The exhibition continues at the Estonian National Museum until 2 March 2025. The choral concert is available to stream via the Klassikaraadio website.
