Ten tones for ten bodies in orbit. Nothing else. The Solar System is one of Ryoji Ikeda's most reduced objects, a 12" containing ten locked grooves, each cut with a single sine wave at a frequency assigned to a different planet. Where Code Name: A-Z took language as its source, this record takes celestial mechanics, and pares it down to the purest signal available.

It was produced by The Vinyl Factory in 2015 for the UK premiere of supersymmetry, Ikeda's large-scale installation shown at the Brewer Street Car Park in Soho that spring. The work grew out of his residency at CERN in Geneva, where his exchanges with particle physicists and engineers became the basis for an attempt to render quantum mechanics and information theory as sound and light: two parallel rooms, one of them a field of moving particles under strobing illumination, the other a corridor of forty synchronised screens flooding the eye with data. The record is a satellite of that project, a way of carrying its logic home as a physical thing.

Ikeda's method is consistent across three decades. From the Raster-Noton albums +/- and Matrix, where sine tones and clicks were arranged at the edge of audibility, to the datamatics and test pattern series, he has treated numerical information as raw material and the human sensory apparatus as the site of the work. The Solar System follows the same principle. A planet is reduced to a number, the number to a frequency, the frequency to a groove that cannot progress. Each side offers a set of fixed points; the listener chooses which body to visit and how long to stay.

Played on a turntable, the effect is closer to tuning than to listening. A single sine wave has no timbre, no attack, no room sound of its own, so what one hears is the frequency and the space around it: the bass tones that settle into the floor, the higher ones that seem to locate themselves inside the skull, the faint bloom of the stylus tracing a circle. Two turntables running side by side produce beating patterns between planets, slow pulses that sit somewhere between music and measurement. There is a distant echo here of Kepler's Harmonices Mundi and its attempt to assign pitches to planetary orbits, though Ikeda strips the idea of any mysticism: no cosmology, no drone, only the data and the disc.

Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, housed in a bespoke screen printed sleeve and mastered by Rashad Becker, whose cutting work for Raster-Noton and PAN has defined the sound of a generation of electronic records, The Solar System is a compact, exacting piece of conceptual sound art. For anyone following Ikeda's long collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, from supercodex through Code Name: A-Z to data-cosm, it is an essential early chapter.