With Ultratronics, Ryoji Ikeda pushes even further his exploration of the relationship between sound, technology, and sensory perception. This work dives into the realms of electronic minimalism with incredible precision, combining glitches, sound waves, and repetitive patterns that slowly build into an immersive, pulsating experience. Every sound is carefully crafted, creating a sonic world that vibrates and evolves in real time, as if the listener were immersed in a stream of data and information.
Ultratronics is a meeting point between the coldness of mathematics and the vitality of an ever-changing sound art. It’s not just electronic music, but an experience that challenges the boundaries between the physical and the virtual. With minimal use of melody and an obsessive attention to acoustic details, Ikeda captures the listener in a sonic landscape that is as hypnotic as it is unsettling. The live performances of Ultratronics amplify this sensation, with visuals interacting with the music, creating a complete fusion of sound and image.
Born in 1966 in Gifu, Japan, Ryoji Ikeda is one of the leading electronic composers and visual artists from Japan. He lives and works between Paris and Kyoto, focusing on the essential characteristics of sound and images such as light, through mathematical precision and aesthetics. Ikeda is recognized as one of the few international artists able to work convincingly with both visual and sound media. His works combine sound, images, materials, physical phenomena, and mathematical concepts in live performances and immersive installations.
His albums such as +/- (1996), 0°C (1998), matrix (2000), dataplex (2005), test pattern (2008), and supercodex (2013) have helped define a new minimalist world in electronic music, due to his precise aesthetic approach. Ikeda pursues long-term projects that include audiovisual performances, installations, and acoustic music compositions. His books and CDs are published by codex | edition, an online platform founded in 2018. In 2022, codex | edition and noton (DE) released ultratronics, his first album in ten years.
His acclaimed audiovisual performance superposition debuted in 2012 at the Festival d’Automne à Paris / Centre Georges Pompidou. It has since been presented in major venues such as the Barbican Centre in London (2013), Concertgebouw in Bruges (2013), Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam (2013), UCLA Center for the Arts of Performance in Los Angeles (2014), Metropolitan Museum in New York (2014), among others.
In 2016, he premiered music for percussion in collaboration with the Eklekto ensemble (CH) at the La Bâtie-Festival de Genève. That same year, he created the drone symphony A [for 100 cars], commissioned by the Red Bull Music Academy Festival in Los Angeles. At the 2019 Fluxus Festival, he presented his composition 100 cymbals, commissioned by the LA Philharmonic. He also collaborated with Hiroshi Sugimoto for At the Hawk’s Well (2019) and with choreographer Pontus Lidberg for Centaur (2020). In 2020, he participated in the Festival Musica in Strasbourg, presenting the premiere of music for percussion 2. Currently, he is working on commissions with Les Percussions de Strasbourg (FR) and Ensemble Modern (DE). In 2022, he presented his new audiovisual live set ultratronics in Tokyo at WWWX Shibuya and MUTEK.JP.
