Ryoji Ikeda

The Solar System is one of the most reduced objects in the catalogue of Ryoji Ikeda: a 12" holding ten locked grooves, each carrying a single sine wave at a frequency assigned to a body of the solar system, from Mercury out to Pluto, with the asteroid belt counted as a body of its own. The Vinyl Factory produced it in 2015 for the UK premiere of supersymmetry, the installation it staged in its space at Brewer Street Car Park in Soho from 23 April to 31 May that year. The record carries the logic of that show home in physical form. Ikeda has spent thirty years turning numbers into sound and light, and here the operation is stripped to its first step: a planet becomes a figure, the figure becomes a pitch, and the pitch is cut into a circle the needle cannot leave.

supersymmetry drew on the exchanges Ikeda had with scientists and engineers during a stay at CERN in Geneva (he had won the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN award in 2014), and VF presented it as an aesthetic reading of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. Ikeda composed and produced the record himself, and Rashad Becker mastered it. There is no melody and no development. Each groove holds one tone with no attack, no decay and no colour beyond its frequency, repeating once per revolution until the arm is lifted, so the listener decides which planet to visit and for how long. A pure tone also behaves differently from music in a room: it sets up standing waves, and a step to one side changes what you hear, which turns the listening into something close to measurement. The same reduction runs through his early albums +/- (1996) and matrix (2000), where sine tones and clicks were placed at the edges of hearing. VF later expanded the idea into a box of ten 10" records in an edition of 100, and has since repressed the 12" alongside Code Name: A-Z, another of Ikeda's locked groove projects with the label.

Pressed on 180 gram heavyweight vinyl, with the ten locked grooves on a single side, in a bespoke screen printed outer sleeve.