Oh, Ryoji, wherefore art thou? Anyone expecting tinctures of infrared and the usual sine language that makes up an Ikeda-storm will be sorely disappointed by the sonics here. Of course, if you were open-minded and respected the man for rising to a challenge, then this may in fact be your cup o' poison. A two-disc set that is in fact a soundtrack for a movie by esoteric filmmaker CS Leigh, See You At Regis Debray is in fact Ikeda's first foray into the genre � whether or not it will be his last should probably not be decided by the extremely dissociative events that inform this particular work.

The film tells the story of the days Andreas Baader, one of the leaders/founders of Germany's notorious Baader-Meinhof group, spent in the Paris apartment of French intellectual R�gis Debray, who himself was a convict on the lam from the his country's authorities in 1969. Having not seen the film leaves me in the unavailing position of having to judge the soundtrack on its own merits, stripped of its attendant parallel to the visual images it was designed to accompany. On that literal judgment alone, I'm afraid that Ikeda's work here is a noble failure. The sounds on hand certainly are amongst the most "natural" and commercial he's ever created � portions of the second disc (track titles are indicated on the sleeve but each piece of music flows as a single entity) incorporate (sampled or otherwise) actual guitars and bass, strung below snatches of musique concr�te that emphasize the cocking of guns, ringing telephones, footsteps, cans opening. The opening movements on disc one contain his recognizable high-pitched whines and eardrum tickles, but these soon depart to instead reveal those incessant ringing telephones, anticlimactic, overlong, and torturous.

It is these sonic fealties that give the rather dull-toned recordings any kind of flair; without them, the overall effect becomes overtly numbing and repetitive, the kind of thing Barry Adamson could probably do in his sleep. Ikeda's rushes incorporate split-second timing rather than segueing discretely from "scene to scene", making for a rather unnerving listen in the privacy of your living room, sans film. Give him credit for the attempt nonetheless, yet this amounts to essentially an mildly amusing exercise, nothing more � Ikeda's an imaginative and laudable experimentalist, but in this instance he's sorely out of his element.