Ryoji Ikeda

data-cosm [n°1] is the soundtrack to the installation of the same name that Ryoji Ikeda made for 180 Studios in London, where it opened on 15 October 2025 and was extended to 1 February 2026. The record holds the full score, seventeen minutes on a single side. In the installation visitors lie on the floor beneath an LED screen that covers the ceiling while the sound surrounds them, and the images run through data on the natural world, from the microscopic scale of particle physics to the macroscopic scale of astrophysics. It extends the approach of his data-verse trilogy, which translated scientific datasets into sound and image, and it is the latest chapter in a long relationship with The Vinyl Factory and 180 Studios.

That relationship began in 2015, when The Vinyl Factory staged the UK premiere of supersymmetry at Brewer Street Car Park in Soho. 180 Studios then showed test pattern at 180 The Strand in 2017, to more than 100,000 visitors, and in 2021 produced his largest European exhibition to date, more than ten works over two floors of the building. For this record Ikeda composed the music and supplied the artwork, Noel Summerville mastered it, and VF pressed it at its plant in Hayes. Ikeda sees no line between the two halves of the work: "I compose sound into music, and I compose pixels and light into video", he told The Vinyl Factory in 2025. 180 Studios warned visitors of high-frequency sounds, intense light and rapid video transitions, and the score follows the pace of the images: one continuous span of electronic pulses, beeps, low thumps and static, cut to the frame and changing as fast as the data on the screen. The vocabulary is the one he has refined since +/- in 1996 and dataplex in 2005, tones and clicks treated as data rather than as instruments, here organised as a single arc built for a room where the body lies still and the ears do the travelling.

Limited to 1,000 copies, pressed on 180 gram heavyweight black vinyl and cut on one side only, in a die-cut outer sleeve with a full colour inner sleeve carrying Ikeda's artwork from the installation.