Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would spend so much of my time alone in a room listening to sine waves. The sine wave is the cleanest, simplest tone possible-- just a pitch, no harmonics, no timbre. It's the stuff of physics classes and test records, but for most of my life, it was not the stuff of music. All that's changed. I've spent many hours in the last couple years with at least a half-dozen records built primarily from sine waves. Some of these I've listened to by choice (Ryoji Ikeda's +/-) some out of review obligation (So Takahashi's 30/30); regardless, I've put in my time with the pure cycle.
I can't help but notice that most of the sine wave-based music I've heard comes from Japan. I'm sure it has something to do with the essentialism of the culture. I've seen Zen line drawings and I've read haiku, so I'm not surprised that Japanese musicians have an interest in the sine wave. For Merge, his second full-length album, Tokyo's Ken Ikeda claims to have constructed the record from a "sound diary" he's kept since 1990. This stockpile of tapes consists of "fragmental pieces of sound reflecting my everyday life over these years." Only a Japanese musician would have a 12-year sound diary consisting primarily of sine wave tones.
"Merge" and "Lightdark", the first two tracks on the album, are the cleanest; both are essentially simple drones with just a faint hint of pitch and textural movement. They're nice enough if you go for this sort of thing, but they ultimately serve as a prelude to better material. With "Cityscape", Ikeda delves into more interesting territory. Like the first two tracks, sine wave drones are the primary focus, but here they serve as what I can only describe as a sheer "curtain" that hangs in front of the primary melody. The pitch-perfect sounds draw your attention, but if you listen more deeply you can hear what is really the guts of the track taking shape in the background.
This obscuring effect is even more pronounced on "No Beginning Nor End". I doubt Ikeda designed this track with my physiology in mind, but "No Beginning Nor End" has a drone somewhere in the 1.5k range, which happens to establish a perfect standing wave in my ear canal. The air in my ear resonates loudly at this pitch no matter what volume I select, which artfully obscures a music-box melody and light drumming happening somewhere in the murky corners of the track. I'm reminded of Luis Buñuel's observation about film that every object in the frame obscures an object behind it. Arranging material in space is the art of deciding what to obscure and how. Ikeda uses his sine wave tones to arrange sound in a three-dimensional space, so that it lies behind (not just underneath) the primary tone in front.
As Merge progresses the character of the album shifts and sound become more complex. The cluster of tones that tumble about randomly in "Gate" have the chime of bells, and "Usual Path" inverts the special relationship of "No Beginning Nor End", putting the metallic percussion in the foreground and burying the drone. The changes are subtle, but after 11 tracks and 55 minutes, you do feel like you've been on a journey, even if you haven't traveled terribly far. Twenty feet is a long way if you're a snail. (Who said that? Basho?) In any event, listen to Merge a few times and I'm sure you'll find a koan in there somewhere. It's that kind of music.
