I’ve been leaving Ryoji Ikeda’s MySpace up and running while I work.

I first started listening to Ikeda when the Microscopic Sound compilation came out in 1999. The rhythmic elements are built out of little squares of white noise, like turning a faucet on and off, or Suicide’s first album, or the old Ice Fever pinball machine. The arhythmic elements (I hesitate to call them melodic) are built out of high-frequency sine waves, basically like sonar pulses, or tinnitus, or icicles falling off your roof.

I enjoy keeping his MySpace up partly because it’s suited to my dime-sized laptop speakers—ideal for reproducing dog-whistle music—and partly because it sounds so neural, like what you’d get if you ran Flanagan’s high-tension tinfoil induction headphones in reverse. When your Swiss Army knife accidentally slices into the 220 volt line, these are the first sounds you hear.

To stop listening to Ryoji Ikeda, please see my Instructable on converting your halo device into a Faraday cage.