How long is your attention span? When listening to music there are probably several 3-minute songs you know every word, every musical twist and turn. The song starts here, navigates through verse and chorus, that piano bit, the weird echo, tiny details that all play out in a form you remember as a whole.
As music gets longer, you start to coast around a bit, things become more porous. As the duration expands, your memory shifts, your attention waivers, and we begin to gently lose our way, perhaps not even sure, at any given moment what we are even listening to…
Far from being a symptom of excessive padding or ideas spread too thinly, in our opinion music that makes you feel this way ends up becoming the standard by which others are measured. You are living with, or even inside the music.
In the case of Roland Kayn, driven in equal parts by utter obsession, academic vigour, and pure unbridled excitement, results in an all-encompassing zone. Time spent dwarfed in his enormous, densely packed textural electronic swarms, and this music, I’d suggest is lethally effective. Music at the very oddest extremity, but, as we’ve stated previously on this site, “might just be the best thing we’ve ever heard”.
Since his passing in 2011, his label Rieger-record-reeks, has been run by his daughter Ilse, and their Bandcamp page as new releases from the archives every month, and currently displays 60 albums. Add in multi disc and LP sets like Scanning (10CD), Tektra (4CD), Infra (3CD), Simulatan (3LP) and A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound (16CD), all combine easily into days of his music.
Somehow, the German-born and Dutch based composers’ overlooked body of work is finally getting the adulation it so richly deserves. The only fly in this ointment being that he never lived to enjoy the warmth from this later day appraisal and love…
The latest hugely significant release, in a discography that is never anything other, is The Ortho-Project.
Another vast 15CD boxset from the Helsinki based label frozen reeds, aided by a legend in his own right, here acting as both archivist and on audio restoration, Jim O’Rourke, and encased in the crisp white alien glyphed antimatter of Robert Beatty’s artwork – a conceptual twin to the interlocking fizzing black hole of the label’s previous monster – A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound.
14 hours long, and sliced into 20 tracks, ranging between 20-minutes and an hour in length, immediately music on this scale causes issues based in the practicality of its vastness. Followed quickly by a thread of superlatives. Here is our deep dive…
Sonically, much of The Ortho-Project immediately sounds more varied. The scoured mist of voices, metallic plates, the whooshes and surges are almost ever present, but everything is peppered with swings, trapdoors, bizarre monoliths, lift shafts and caverns that bend and fold space. Effects, layered elements, reactions, and the fizzing of energy. The mirages of bells, strings, orchestras, the smudged saw-toothed ambience of hundreds of moving sheets of hyper-cubed sandpaper.
Over time as you ease into this glorious headfuck, the whole thing is a rolling boil of chaotic hyperactive wormholes. Sounds that emit from your speakers in lopsided patterns, shards and mist-like field recordings from another dimension.
Tracks like Skips are peppered in agitated vastness, travelling at light speed, as fragments and shadows loom and overlay. The hanging ghostly ambience and illusion of calm in the 40-minute plateau of Ataraly, the wonky bells and distorted geometries of Sonoitys, and the rippling gas leaks and elastic bubbles of Tirals. The surprisingly hypnogogic blurring of Ktoor or the abstracted infinitely splintered droning of Ecardy. The swamped, bleached out fanfares of Attirares, slowly smouldering into cavernous inky black nothingness.
This set gathers twenty stargates all fuelled up and ready to take you somewhere impossible.
Images of his modular synthesizer setup hidden under banks of cables from earlier in his career only proves this music’s complexity is way beyond any simple explanation. An image of Kayn included with this release, working in his studio at this later stage, shows a more home-made system. A stack of amps, tape decks, equalizers, turntable and tape spools. Everything presumably plugged into each other like some audio fever dream of the game Mouse Trap, a mad science experiment realised. The system – simply a means of accepting sound on any format, which is then vaporised, reduced to molecular paste, and then rebuilt with baffling otherworldly knowledge, precision and logic. This machine meant that feeding any sound would produce valid results, so the invitation might well be just to try anything and everything… An entire world heard through a unique aural kaleidoscope, sitting on a desk in a room, in the Netherlands.
Kayn had worked with these processes and sounds for four decades by this point, immersed in the ability to create these infinite sonic architectures. The cybernetic quality of the music, where the machines and process, absorb and drive a huge degree of decision making, is at its very core. Rather than teasing a tantalising glimpse into the unknown – we are offered a warm invitation to settle here for hours.
As with all of Kayn’s work, the only oblique clue of any sort is in its title. Ortho has several usages in medicine, chemistry, geometry and its root meaning is upright – perhaps here the binary opposite of asleep. Present or not, on or off, The Ortho-Project could easily fill any one of those upright times – a waking single day. Hit play at 8am, (as a player or listener) do your human things, and the machines do theirs, return to sleep mode at 10pm that night. Repeat as often as required…
What you do in that time, how it mingles or effects anything is irrelevant, what order you play it doesn’t make any difference, and how much attention you give it or don’t, again – doesn’t matter. Kayn had retired from decades of teaching and research at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, and this project was the first major work he threw himself into afterwards. Clearly the suddenly found freedom had a bearing, and it’s possible the logic of a recording on this scale, or how it may be released, wasn’t the most pressing consideration at the time. The Ortho-Project might well have been his chance to finally push his process as he saw fit, revisit, remix, redigest everything he had learnt, had to hand, and built to this point, allowing the whole system to be fleshed out towards its beautifully driven conclusions.
Whilst it may seem befitting to categorise this work within some later day classical tradition, lost for hours in this heady broth ends up more like the wildest form of outsider electronic experimentation. Milan Knizak’s Broken Music, O’Rourke’s own steamroom series, James Hamilton’s APEIROZOAN or COMAOCEAN, even longform Autechre might all approximate aspects of what this sounds like but despite suggesting various RIYL, everything here is next level – singular and unmistakably Kayn.
All these theories, references, questions and more, will continue to hang in space but taken as a wildly awe inspiring, monstrously surfaced day, or more likely, via a smaller track by track basis, the effect is searingly alien. Digested in ways Kayn wouldn’t have necessarily envisaged, late night zone outs, background office ambience, the soundtrack to remote riverside, forest walks, beaches, in places he never visited, and by people he never knew, the music functions like oil and water – somehow initially repellent, and then quickly animating into a thoroughly engrossing and inescapable adventure.
Here we have Kayn answering the sobering earth-based question about how he might spend his well-earned retirement. A time when folk often understandably try to slow down. The focus might become the garden, maybe picking up a hobby or craft to help keep one’s mind and body sharp. But here, retirement was simply a new opportunity to drive even harder, his world still had infinite new networks to map, and new co-ordinates to be punched in. It’s also clear Kayn is jamming here, and an amazed audience member – he’s having fun. The Ortho-Project therefore forms as a mission statement, another whole vocabulary, fuelling and forming the staggering mountain of works he made from here until this passing, sadly only 6 years later.
So, tiny human attention spans somehow don’t really figure here – approach this however you wish. But it’s guaranteed that quicker than what may seem likely, your brain will settle, you’ll hear sounds unlike anything you’ve encountered before, any resistance will dissolve, your frame of mind will change and an indefinable form of elation will flood your brain.
The Ortho-Project is clearly amazing.
Another monumental, seismic variant on his unique mind-blowing approach. Another feast of God-tier weird, a white, gold and pink altar to Kayn’s manic drive and single-minded obsession.
Another day of utter magnificence.
The Orthno-Project is out now on frozen reeds
Visit Roland Kayn website here, and explore other releases here
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