Start at the beginning. It’s the way we instinctively approach anything. Once we hear something and start to explore, that entry point gets considered in relation to the overall story. For artists that have discographies that span hours of music, and dozens of releases, we often head straight to the earliest stuff. We want to follow the story and plot the development.
With Roland Kayn, getting to that point has been hard, based on so many of these pivotal releases having only been available as hugely rare and expensive, long since out of print LP boxsets, or works so vast, they required five, ten or even, fifteen or sixteen CDs to capture their arcs. Whilst it’s not been totally consistent, our slow exploration through Kayn’s long form works had us broadly working backwards, from his most recent, slowly unravelling back to the earliest ones.
The previous most recent release – last year’s The Ortho Project (2007), fills a full day linking to the inky black counterpointed night of A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (2009). Two enormous works made in Kayn’s later years, form the yin and yang conclusion of his staggering mission, before his passing in 2011.
However, the successive mind frying adventures of Scanning (1983-84), Tektra (1980-81), Infra (1981) and Simultan (1977) held us in a singular sonic nirvana, as his processes and sonic architectures slowly splintered into ever-dizzying forms. This story didn’t suffer any early day’s naivety or held back by technical ability – the earlier we delved, the inverse happened, as more options grew out of every impossible moment. Whilst everything remained shrouded in mystery – how these huge chunks of electronic abstraction came into being – the early stuff felt like the future was impacting the past. Kayn’s work seems to have always gloriously sat at odds with everything else.
Therefore, this new five hours and five CD boxset gathering Elektroakustische Projekte & MAKRO is a cause for huge excitement here. Both originally released as two separate three LP boxsets by the Italian label Colosseum, Elektroakustische Projekte gathers works from 1966-1975, and MAKRO from 1977, and now freshly remastered, and reissued on his very own Rieger-record-reeks, now run by Kayn’s daughter Ilse.
Elektroakustische Projekte
Kayn had studied composition and organ since 1952, composed orchestral works, was part of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, but this collection feels like, what he’d probably agree was his creative starting point. After all the logistical nightmares of trying to physically perform his early works, access to technology was the liberating moment.
Therefore, the three parts of CYBERNETICS from the late sixties – feels like the beginning of the whole journey that framed Kayn’s obsession for almost the next half century, and the rest of his life.
Immediately we are in a wild place, the sound of gurgling drains, caged animals, metallic scrapings and squealing, as sounds roll around the stereo image. Snatches of skewed reality gather in bundles – street sounds, chatter, seagulls, chopped into a binary opera, forming and disappearing in your jolted imagination. It’s a field recording from another dimension.
That unmistakable whooshing and surging that informed everything from here on, underpinning the entire hour of spinetingling bedlam. We are in the midst of a wildly psychedelic maelstrom – deserving its very own blue plaque – as the birthplace of the highest quality warp out.
Three other pieces complete the first part of this boxset, all offering tantalising Kayn-sized glimpses into other adjacent galaxies.
ENTROPY PE 31 luxuriates in fifty-two minutes of mayhem. As the title obliquely frames – growing from thirty-one separate sound sources, and then allowing them to bend, buckle and blossom into fizzing edges, metallic explosions, alien sermons and thick rumbling near silences.
Sounds bounce around hyperactively throughout the thirty-two-minute-long MONADES. The title means the most basic or original substance, a Supreme Being, divinity or the totality of all things according to the Pythagoreans. The sounds here all seem to focus on a tiny fragment. It’s like the same instant is continually regenerated, repositioned and reimagined. The palette at times reminds us of Vladmir Ussachevy’s Wireless Fantasy but here, rather than a sea of radio waves and sound sources, Kayn has found a whole galaxy in one squealing atom.
The final part of the collection’s first half closes with the utterly wild thirty minutes of EON. A crunchingly abstract ride through electronic sequences, glitches and buzzes. Even as the volume recedes in the second half of the piece, any sense of calm never really solidifies.
MAKRO
Made a few years after these works, MAKRO is spread over the final two discs in this collection. Its three parts creating a deeply impressive two hours and fifty minutes of immediately spectacular weirdness. The sleeve notes outline the concept at the heart of the composition, is what Kayn called a ‘black box’. What is going on within the system isn’t entirely clear beyond the fact sounds are inputted, and then navigate frequency dividers, product modulators, flipflop circuits, amplifiers and reverberating machines. What any of this means is a guess, but the broad idea seems to be that sounds are processed in a way that Kayn only partially has control over. The black box continually reacts and develops anything it’s fed.
Taking a step back from the ‘how’ in the music, the actual results pouring out your speakers are utterly spellbinding. A vast rolling boil of fragmented drones, growing, evolving, surging, diving and erupting into wildly abstract peaks and deep space voids. The first time I listened, it was just another succession of sounds that yet again, despite being exposed to sonic weirdness for decades, these ears had never met before.
MAKRO starts to feel like an immersive three-dimensional space, where every atom leads somewhere new. Each tiny movement activates a series of new events, impossibly complex but somehow hyper connected and continually fluid and agile. Eventually, after falling through infinite trapdoors, MAKRO settles into long agitated drone in the final section before dissolving into an intergalactic roar…
It’s clear all over again that listening to this music is different to anything else. This collection adds another 5 hours to our shelves that already holds whole days of Kayn’s music. I remain completely at sea with what is going on, why it has such a deep effect on me, and why time spent listening to it feels completely unique. Kayn’s music defies any kind of shorthand explanation, it’s like a barium meal that reveals its own network. The sounds flood the system, react, forced to bend, break down and reform in ways that make complete and no sense. What the sound is, doesn’t seem to matter, it’s just material to illustrate how it’s being sculpted.
This music fills time differently, encourages a form of detailed listening that feels unique, time spent that builds into an indescribable form of elation. Music that places you in a unique and sustained frame of mind.
Perhaps part of the idea of starting at the beginning of an artist’s journey is about understanding them at their purest. Maybe our deep love of Kayn, and our backwards trajectory through his work, had us secretly hoping the starting point might make it easier to understand what came next, somehow, we’d eventually earn a cheat code.
What’s apparent, straight from the opening moments of CYBERNETICS 1 (1966-68) until his equipment fell silent decades later, our hero (for he is certainly that) opened the door to a new universe of sound no one else seems to have found, yet alone dared to open.
Elektroakustische Projekte & MAKRO collected here, is yet more perfection in a sea of perfection. Kayn is younger here, perhaps at points – wilder, but yet again creating music that’s elevated beyond anything else – an embarrassment of riches in a hall of mirrors…
Elektroakustische Projekte & MAKRO is out now.
Purchase from kayn.nl or boomkat
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