A sequel of sorts to the Dataplex album, Ryoji Ikeda's Test Pattern is based around a self-created cross-platform conversion system that takes any format of data (whether auditory, textual or pictorial) as a source to be transformed into visual scan patterns. This 'material' is then re-constituted as audio data, ready to be sculpted into composed structures by Ikeda. Consequently, Ikeda is able to standardize all media and all types of information, reconfiguring everything within the parameters of that familiar language of his: high frequency sine tones, building-shaking bass and razor sharp fragments of digital noise.

Where his Raster-Noton label companion Alva Noto might also be seen to occupy this sort of digital sonic terrain, it clear that Ikeda isn't nearly so preoccupied with the regularities of rhythm, linear development and/or other such more evidently 'musical' concerns. Instead, "Test Pattern" feels like a stream of living data in flux, often manifesting itself in a confoundingly complex, sensory assaulting fashion. Apparently, due to this music's extreme rate of dynamic change it can't be properly represented by lower bitrate formats like MP3 - which makes sense considering the awesome extremities of "Test Pattern", an album that shifts between stuttering, phased micro-pulsations and blasts of pure digital noise, seemingly in tenths-of-second intervals.

After a series of dedicated listens considering "Test Pattern" you start to understand the choice of title: Ikeda seems to be challenging you to keep up with his music, to be able to take in such severe sound matter without the safety nets of harmony and rhythm. Arduous as it can often seem, any serious follower of the more 'experimental' ends of electronic music won't want to miss out on the incomparable experience. The album also has the ancillary benefit of acting as a divining tool in discerning the quality of your home hi-fi as well as your friend's/ g-friend's/ b-friend's supposed open-minded relationship with "music". Digital aural divination sounds pretty lofty, but how else could one describe the work of this most technological of sound sculptors?