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Cyclo., "id"
Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai have made some of the most intense, exciting and intriguing electronic music of the last 20 years, mostly apart but they came together as Cyclo. ten years ago with a terrific self-titled album. When the follow up landed on my doorstep recently, I was expecting something great and got something unexpectedly better than I hoped for instead. Their debut was only a warm up, a training session. id is the real deal. Combining Nicolai’s hard yet yielding rhythms with Ikeda’s lust for ear-bending sounds, the duo has created a stunning album that aims to fuse their music (and their concept of music) with the visual arts.
 
Sonically, id is flawless. Although divided into 11 tracks, it feels like one long progression. Beats are persistent, omnipresent but they crack and falter repeatedly only to flow again as if nothing happened. The rhythms are interesting but at the end of the day they are pretty much standard beats.
The draw of id is the nature of the sounds which bring to mind Ikeda’s exploration of data as a sound source over the last few years. The range of sounds seem to be limited to beeps, blips, and electronic interference but there are surprising depths to this palette. Part of this comes from the mastering (or to be more precise the lack of mastering for reasons explained below). The dynamic range is huge, the frequencies go from the ultra low (I was listening to this in my car and my mirrors all pulsed to the beats) to I assume to inaudibly high. The music is electrifying; at points I get a serious case of shivers down my spine as the sounds pummel my auditory cortex into submission.
Yet it is not Ikeda and Nicolai’s intention to make merely an album of glorious sounds. Not one millisecond of id had been composed with a final sound in mind. Instead, each sound was chosen for its appearance on an oscilloscope as Cyclo have intended the album to be listened to while simultaneously watching the output of an oscilloscope being fed the audio. They have left the audio deliberately unmastered, as mastering (and MP3 compression) would destroy the images they had assembled. Unfortunately, oscilloscopes are the kind of instruments that tend to be difficult to find in normal life (despite my best efforts). It is frustrating to be listening to an album when it is intended to be absorbed as a synaesthetic blend of visual and audio art. Granted, Ikeda and Nicolai have a "publication" planned that will present the visuals but it is unclear whether this will be a printed publication (which would miss out on the audio) or a DVD (which is probably how this should have been released in the first place).
Despite the annoyance of not being able to obtain access to an oscilloscope, id is an incredible album. I have a lot of time for both Ikeda and Nicolai but even as a long-term fan, this has been a total joyous shock to my ears. To have the complete picture (pun intended) would be perfect but in the meantime, the audio alone is more than enough to occupy me. Of course, if anyone reading this knows of a good (free) oscilloscope program for Mac, please let me know!
samples:
 
