The minimalist presentation of Ryoji Ikeda's programmes and CD covers, all white space and spot varnish, belies a music that can be violent, visceral and bone-shakingly resonant. His sounds seem to emerge from the deepest recesses of a mega-computer.
On this occasion Ikeda doesn't actually "perform" - he sits at the back while the prerecorded piece Formula [ver. 2.3] goes through its audiovisual paces, with a synchronised strobe that lights up the stage in front of the screen from time to time. The rapidly changing numbers, word streams and hyperactive split-screen montages feel like a past imagining of the future.
For the second half of the concert we see a wider screen and another 45-minute long piece, C4I. If Formula was an extended experimental music video, C4I is more like a short film; it's the stronger work, but the visuals lead. The opening images - turning pages and rapid scans - are interrupted by a hand drawing a ruled line with a pencil. Data, statistics and financial graphs are rapidly animated. A world map becomes obscured by a network of white lines. There's a polemical edge: a brooding orchestral passage loops while Ikeda presents typed statements such as: "Only 20% of the world's population have access to a free press," and "82% of the world's smokers are in developing countries."
There are times when C4I is in danger of becoming a dull nature film, with sped-up film of shorelines and bare hills; Ikeda is more comfortable with the man-made world of cities, tunnels, road markings and endless data, a kind of info-porn. The piece ends in a delirious climax of clocks, syncopated typing and slamming, low-frequency pulses, like monster kick drums.
Ikeda's work may teeter between the pretentious and the profound. But if you spend your days at a computer and your nights in throbbing clubs, it makes a kind of sense. And if you don't, then his sensory overload, for the moment, provides a window on the zeitgeist.