Ken Ikeda 'Merge'. Touch Records

Full colour digipack with colour photographs.

TRACKLIST
1. Merge
2. Lightdark
3. Cityscape
4. No beginning Nor end
5. Gate
6. Usual Path
7. Yume (dream)
8. Old moon in the arm of the new moon
9. Ambiguity
10. Equinoctial week
11. Merged into a circle

Ken Ikeda is a musician and artist who has composed and recorded for David Lynch and for Moriko Mori, latterly
as part of the Royal Academy's 'Apocalypse' exhibition in 2001. He featured as part of Sonic Boom, at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2000.

He has released two albums for Touch. The first, "tzuki [Moon]"
(Touch # T33.17, 2000), was strangely reminiscent of early Durrutti Column, hypnotic, dreamy and mystical. ["a breathtaking update of Eno's and Aphex's best chill-out soundtracks" "both pleasing and haunting."], Here a darker side to his work unfolds; although retaining Buddhist notions of circles and cycles and other natural laws and influences, here he contemplates nature's shadowy side.

The title, "Merge", has as its root 'to drown' or 'immerse' oneself, its current usage with regard to convergence or (business) partnership not recorded until 1926 (OED). The double-edged nature of this recording is also reflected by its entirely different aspect determined by whether one plays it at high or low volume.

These notions are counterpointed by Jon Wozencroft's photography - merge, submerge - two small and uninhabited islands almost enveloped by the rising sea levels, juxtaposed with a view of New York's Upper East Side, taken from Central Park, skyscrapers swimming in the cloud cover...

For a full biography, images and other information, as well as an exclusive track for free download, not available
on the album, go to his new website at http://www.kenikeda.com

Reviews of tzuki [Moon]:

On Ken Ikeda's first CD release, he redirects his efforts from
gallery and installation work (including collaborations with video
artist Mariko Mori) into the terrain of "ambient" home listening.
Tzuki - on the surface a breathtaking update of Eno's and Aphex's best chill-out soundtracks - is as nuanced and precise as the most ambitious microsound exploration, just more soothing. Melodies slow to a crawl, like the heartbeat of a nearly-frozen body or the creep of a Northern river's ice-flow; there are no "hooks", only nooks and crannies where sound pools and trickles through. Sour-toned timbres - staples of Japanese electronica from Ken Ishii's early ambient works
through Susuma Yokota's most recent recordings - characterize most of the tracks here, lending Ikeda's sound the quality of light refracted through a melted lens. [Philip Sherburne, XLR8R, USA]

A highly listenable excursion into the realms of resonant Eno-esque electronics. For this release, Ikeda works largely with music samples from film soundtracks, although you would hardly know it as, through intensive processing, he's erased all traces of his footsteps like an ice-sculptor working in the snow. His aim in any case is not some ironic comment on society through rehashing fragments of pop culture (so no Apocalypse Now dialogue samples here, thank heavens). Ken's
aims are more high-minded, even mystical; he wants to communicate with the God of images, and by doing so, communicate with the past and try to say a holy mass for our ancestors. This could be a very futuristic take on aspects of traditional Japanese worship. There's liturgy embedded in these digital tones. There's also a hymn to nature. Any one of these racks, but especially 'Looking for the Moon', evoke the perfect frame of mind for contemplating natural phenomena, and dwelling on the holy mysteries. Sometimes it is so
gorgeous that it could almost make you cry...One of the better
releases from Touch and one that seems fully attuned to the mystical aspirations of that label. [Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector, UK]

"tzuki [Moon]" on Touch is a fantastic probing of the incidental and hypnotic sounds that hover in our crowded and busy ambiences and our tinnitus infected ears. A ringing that hearkens us to pursue the music down some enchanted corridor as we are led away from our contemporary worries. Orpheus too "with his singing lyre led the trees, led the wild beasts of the wildernessSeverything animate and inanimate followed. He moved the rocks on the hillsides and turned the courses of the rivers." This may be what the music might have sounded like if Orpheus had had access to sound software. Highly recommended. [Bart Plantegna, Wreck This Mess Radio, Amsterdam] Ken Ikeda's music is crystalline. Tzuki (Moon) is made from shards of crystal, delicately chiseled and assembled into skeletons of songs. And then, it feels as if the crystal liquefied and became water, since nothing is strong enough to apply pressure on it: songs drift by, a gentle melody accompanied by undercurrents of backward notes. Always on the verge of analog synthesis and electronics, of 1970s
German-school electronic music and 1990s computer manipulation, Ikeda's music is both pleasing and haunting. [Francois Couture, AMG, France]

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