Ryoji Ikeda

music for percussion documents a turn in the work of Ryoji Ikeda: no electronics, no projections, only four percussionists on stage. The piece was commissioned by Eklekto, the Geneva percussion collective founded in 1974 that has premiered more than a hundred new works, and it was first heard at La Bâtie Festival de Genève in September 2016. Ikeda's idea was to make acoustic instruments produce the purity and texture of his electronic music, so that what you see the players do is not what you expect to hear. It continues the acoustic research he had started with the string pieces of op. between 2000 and 2002, and The Vinyl Factory issued it on LP in 2017, a year before a CD with booklet appeared.

Ikeda wrote and conceived both works, and four Eklekto players perform them. Side A opens with Body Music [for duo], op.4, three short movements in which two percussionists build a fast, interlocking counterpoint out of handclaps alone. Metal Music, op.5 follows in three parts. The first is a duo for triangles; the second is a duo for crotales, the small bronze discs here bowed with violin bows to draw out a polyphony of high, almost sinusoidal tones that sit very close to Ikeda's electronic palette. The whole of side B goes to the third movement, for quartet, which on stage places the four players among twelve suspended cymbals laid out like a landscape. Christian Prommer recorded the handclap pieces and the triangles at Red Bull Studio in Berlin in February 2017, while Jean Keraudren recorded the crotales and cymbals at Théâtre Pitoëff in Geneva on 10 September 2016, during the festival run. Ikeda mixed and mastered everything himself in Paris and Kyoto between May and August 2017. Everything was played live, with no overdubbing, no editing and no processing, so the sustained shimmer of the metal and the precision of the clapping are entirely acoustic. The stage version toured widely after Geneva, including concerts at the Barbican in London and at Romaeuropa in 2018.

Edition of 1,000 copies, pressed on 180 gram black vinyl, with the six tracks numbered in sequence across the two sides.