Ikeda's association with Raster-Noton has not only been productive, it's the logical place to house him and his spare digital aesthetic. Unlike the recently reissued 1000 Fragments, Test Pattern continues Ikeda's ascent up to the limitless bandwidth of blip arcana, "simple" machine pulse, and microwave dynamics. While others who worship the glitch (a term and genre appellation that does a great disservice, and inaccurately defines, Ikeda's artistic motivations) arch towards either rote dance music imperatives or haphazard experimentations, Ikeda is essentially a purist: his domain lies in extolling the virtues of pop, (mis)click, hiss, tone, and tic, proceeding to draft such digital detritus into subtle anomalies wholly rhythmic, wholly persuasive, and, at times, even catchy.

Ikeda himself might or might not take to such an observation. Nevertheless, a good number of the tracks on Test Pattern tend to coalesce enough so our frontal lobes perceive them as works strangely "musical." Through broken up into sixteen pieces, the disc flows as a single electrical signal might through pliant fibre optics, encountering along the way detours, deviations, changes in intensity and volume, key nuance, and obvious variability. "Test Pattern #0001" crackles like fine crystal being punctuated by bolts of plasma, exploding and imploding across any number of stereo frequencies. As the rather short pieces subsequently unfold, we're bombarded with what resembles looped end-groove noise, dense webs of fuzz, crushed radio waves, and the odd explosion of pink noise. Resolutely, unabashedly minimal, cold as ice yet instantly compelling, these mini-fugues of static discharge suggest some performance space vacuum stripped bare by viral strains of irresistible ones and zeros. It comes down to the seventh piece, "Test Pattern #0111," where Ikeda allows himself the pleasure of the "beat," at least in theory, resolving his propulsive tendencies enough so that by track nine, "Test Pattern #1001", things are, by Ikeda's staunch digitalic standards, positively jaunty, a sprightly array of conjunctive hiss, sculpted distortion and granulated pop.

Many might argue Ikeda's m.o. to be an acquired taste, where a little goes a long way. Maybe so, but that certainly isn't the point: highlighting the exactitude of software's basal properties, splitting digital hairs as it were, in Ikeda's hands the contemporary sound artist's magic wand is incontestably the mouse, and he wields it like a mathematician juggling equations. What results is a tactile nano-music that becomes engaging enough to bypass both theorizing and execution in an effort to make its algorithmic sounds, well, click.