Cyclo

Part database dump, part teaser for the forthcoming publication featuring a joint retrospective of their visual work, Id is the second release by Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda after a ten-year break. The album initially feels like a digital sketchbook of half-finished ideas. The opener alone is a scrapheap of styles, piling up Nicolai's minimalist spaciousness against Ikeda's ADD pulse emissions. As it unfolds, the album finds many interesting sidetracks, including odd, out-of-time gabber mashes that sound like Alec Empire trapped in a Gameboy. Eventually a strange, but effective synthesis of both artists' methodology emerges and consumes the ear. In the way that free-jazz sometimes issues unexpected bursts of melody once you're attuned, so do some of these pieces become surprisingly musical, even danceable, along the floor's x-y axis.