Roland Kayn

Ok, wow, Roland Kayn has managed to fly under my radar until I saw this thread update a few hours ago. I read the linked articles, listened to some samples, etc. and was blown away. And now, "A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound" is on its way toward my doorstep. (deepdiscount.com had the best price I could find, and they have it in stock.)
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU FOR THIS THREAD

'Electronic Milky Way' is an impressively mammoth late-career ffwd collage but 'Tektra' is still the one I recommend as a first stop

'Scanning' is still sinking in. Tektra seems like the zenith of the previous 10 years of cramming as much as possible inside a four hour long arc -- it's uniform but also packed with detail. Scanning was the first attempt at a ten hour long structure, and it's making a point of stressing the auto-regulation over the interaction -- there's more sonic variety between movements, but once each 20-30 minute movement starts, it stays. I almost hear him forcibly restraining himself, keeping his hands off the knobs and just waiting for the changes to happen, and then they happen

also noticed soundohm started offering a bundle. no reason not to buy direct from Kayn's family though.

https://www.soundohm.com/product/reiger-records-reeks-bundle-29-cd/pid/37193/

link no work, but if you search through: 80 minutes worth of 4 minute excerpts. all of the Electronic Symphonies are pretty full throttle

Thank you for the tips! I'm diving into "Tektra" after finding some downloads (192 kbps MP3s, not optimal but not terrible) - $300 is a little too steep for me!
https://kayn.nl/shop/vinyl/tektra/
Someone in Italy has a used copy for $250 (not including s/h): https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/767495?ev=rb
I've been enjoying "Simultan" also, from that AGP link above.

I did feel, when I heard "Tektra" for the first time, that I'd been searching for this music all my life.

really regret having to sell that beautiful milky way of sound box but the recent Kayn Ascension really warms the heart

This is gonna be long, but I’m a massive Kayn fan and hopefully I’ll get some readers to check out stuff by him they don’t know.

Roland Kayn has been by far my biggest musical discovery in a very long time. His music is singular, occupying a sound world all its own. It is often haunting and desolate, as if it’s the music of different worlds, different planets or galaxies, far away from humanity, reflecting the cold vastness of the universe.

A bit over a year ago, when I was discovering his oeuvre, I kept thinking, why is this guy so obscure when his music is mind-blowing? I’ve identified several reasons:

1) His old LP box sets are unaffordable for all but the really wealthy collectors (except for “Simultan” which was reissued in 2018), so almost no one knows them;
2) The CDs he released on his own label, Reiger-records-reeks, have always been expensive and they have almost no distribution (and I guess they had even less in the past);
3) After Kayn died in 2011, apparently his bereaved family was not interested in reissuing the LP boxes and were not eager to sell the CDs that had been released.

Fortunately he’s become more well-known since 2017 due to two new releases and a reissue. Apparently Reiger-records-reeks, now run by Kayn’s daughter and having come back from hibernation last year with the release of “Scanning”, will continue releasing his works in the future, and Die Schachtel is meant to reissue the rest of his old LP boxes (although when they’ll see the light of day is anyone’s guess; “Tektra” was meant to be released last spring... In the meantime, I've resorted to mp3 rips.)

My favourite Kayn releases seem to be different from pretty much everyone else’s. “Tektra” seems to be the favourite of many, and while I love it, just like I love “Makro”, “Infra” and “Scanning” (the three works that are similar in style), my favourites are probably his ten Electronic Symphonies. They’re insanely good, extremely accomplished, varied, and many of them are full of unexpected twists and turns. Kayn sometimes samples classical music or his own previous works (such as “Makro” on the 5th and possibly the 6th Symphony, or “Simultan” on the 4th) on them. His four “Multiplex Sound-Art” releases are arguably his most surprising and varied works. They sometimes incorporate very diverse samples (one track even samples Radiohead!) and sounds. “Gärten Der Lüste” is up there with his Symphonies for me, come to think of it. It’s unbelievable electroacoustic music (although I had to get over the fact that the first, shorter track extensively samples two Social Interiors tracks with very little modification). I should point out that the music on all these CDs sounds extremely good and has an immense sense of space. When listened to on a good hi-fi, the effect is astonishing.

In regards to the LP boxes, “Simultan” and “Elektroakustische Projekte” are somewhat similar in style. The former is one long and fantastic work, while the latter is a compilation of several pieces (of which the last two don’t really click with me, but the two-part “Entropy PE 31” in the middle makes up for this). The music on these two releases is often noisy, grating and bizarre. Starting from “Makro”, Kayn found the style he’s most known for: an amorphous, slowly but constantly changing flow of otherworldly sound. This style is continued on the first two of his three cybernetic music CDs, while the third one has different kinds of pieces too. They’re all excellent, unique and strange.

Finally, there’s the mammoth 16 CD box set “A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound”, recorded in 2009. It’s probably the Kayn release most people are familiar with. My opinion about it again differs from that of most fans: while I like it a lot and consider it a unique work with a unique atmosphere, I think the piece could’ve been a lot shorter as there’s little variety between the discs. Of course, that’s how long Kayn made it to be, and I still enjoy listening to it a lot (it’s especially great to hear snippets of his previous work here and there, like samples from “Entropy PE 31” and “Electronic Symphony IV”), but overall I think it’s too long.

Kayn made about 300 works (all listed chronologically on kayn.nl), most of them electronic. By my count all of his pre-2001 electronic works have been released except for one (“Kristallnacht”), but he made an insane amount of music after 2001, so here’s hoping many of them will see the light of day eventually.

Someone in this thread asked how the reissue of “Simultan” sounds. I have the black vinyl version, and the mastering sounds great to me (can't compare it to the original release though), and the pressing quality is good overall too (I cleaned my copy before playing it, knowing Die Schachtel's vinyl releases often aren't quality pressings, and now only one side has clicks and pops, but they're not too bad).

Thanks for the post, good stuff!

https://rolandkayn.bandcamp.com/releases

Awesome, thx Jon.

could get dangerous!

& seconding acsenger's comments about the Electronic Symphonies. part of the appeal for me is the connection between cyberneticism and plunderphonia -- when your output is your input, the line between transformation and direct referencing gets blurry. it wasn't an accident the recycling logo turned up on Arcane Device records as well as Negativland records. will have to check out those Social Interiors albums, I know Rik Rue's work a little bit

been spending a lot of time with Leo Kupper's music and even made a pilgrimage to visit his GAME synthesizer at his basement in Brussels. wasn't working, but amazing to see it unpatched after years of seeing the spaghetti pile in Kayn's liner notes. putting the components on the outside of the panels in lieu of labels has its own kind of utility, and definitely results in a very literal, and totally overwhelming visual design. don't know what to say, it was so beautiful. I wonder how quickly Kayn's 3-6 LP 70's boxes came together; they definitely sound largely real time. Kupper said Kayn spent a lot of weekends down in that basement.

https://rolandkayn.bandcamp.com/album/made-in-the-nl-after-the-sixties-and-beyond

third bandcamp release of an unreleased piece (fourth if you count the remastered 'Requiem pour Patrice Lumumba' which they put up for bandcamp's BLM fundraising day).

the first two were from 2003, which made me think they were just going to plow through the hundreds of hours of pieces in mostly chronological order. which was satisfying in one way, kinda terrifying in another. this third one's skipped forwards to 2008 and seems a little closer to top shelf - if it's in similar sonic to 'Milky Way' it's also in some ways clearly a trial run for it, amalgamating hispeed playback of his 60's pieces

It is striking how putting these out one hour at a time raises the stakes for each first encounter. Having three to ten hours worth of sound with each new release has always seemed like an important part of the presentation. And while I cosigned O'Rourke's comment in that interview upthread about how part of the appeal of Kayn is how mysterious his process was, aka 'I don't know how he did this'... well, on post-2003 home studio pieces, that varispeed dictaphone playback is pretty inescapable... 'Music for the Isle of Man' spends fair chunk of time mangling that cassette of gamelan music and it sounds great but you can also basically see the guy's finger on the fast-forward button

bandcamp is perfect for this in the long run though, random streaming = pure abstraction. I don't know how long I'll keep buying FLACs and burning them to CDR for first listen but eventually, eventually they'll get to 'Ortho-Project' or 'The Assurgenty Progressions'

I'm glad the Kayn Bandcamp page was started. I prefer physical formats (CDs most of all) and only ever bought two downloads before, but when a new Kayn piece appears on BC, I buy it straight away, and I'm happy with them being only files. Realistically, with such a huge oeuvre as Kayn's, releasing files is the quickest and cheapest way of getting his works out into the world. I hope the pace of one previously unreleased piece roughly every month will continue in the long term.

In terms of what's been released on BC so far (not counting "Requiem Pour Patrice Lumumba", which had been released on CD before), my favourite is "The Man and the Biosphere". It's a fantastic, inventive and imaginative piece. "Music for the Isle of Man" is also great. The manipulated breakbeat part in the second half is also featured in "Redundancy TR", another piece from 2003, which has been released on CD. To be precise, I don't think the two pieces share exactly the same material, but they're nearly identical. It's remarkable, by the way, how often Kayn sampled his own work, and I keep discovering more examples of this as I get to know his oeuvre better. For example, I'm now listening to "L'Innominata" (from the "Gärten Der Lüste" double CD) and it contains a short part (among many other, non-Kayn samples) of his "Electronic Symphony IX", I believe. Before that I listened to "Electronic Symphony III", and I think it relies heavily on samples from "Tektra" (I don't know the latter sufficiently yet to be certain though).

The latest piece on BC, "Made in NL After the Sixties and Beyond" was a bit of a disappointment, I have to say. I think this is the first Kayn piece where I don't hear anything new, any exciting elements compared to what he's already done before. It consists exclusively of elements that he'd already done a number of times on some of his CDs. This is not to say it isn't an excellent Kayn piece that I greatly enjoy, it's just that he could do better.

I'm still amazed that with the reissue trend that's been going on for a long time and which has seen many previously obscure electronic/electroacoustic releases reissued, four of the five Kayn LP box sets have still not been reissued. Luckily, Reiger-records-reeks is working on its next physical release, in addition to the Bandcamp project. Going through Kayn's list of works on his website is partly a sad exercise for me, because I know most of them will never be released, as there are just too many. Of course, not all of them can be really good, but I'd still love to hear all of them (which would, of course, be a massive undertaking). Anyway, hopefully a lot of them will be made available either on BC or as physical releases.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

https://rolandkayn.bandcamp.com/album/a-pan-air-music

like that one. shamelessly lovely opening

still get a thrill at single-file releases over 80 minutes long

very into this one

otherwise, i’m behind on these bandcamp releases. highlights to date?

oh y'know we're well into listen-once territory already, which is kind of the point. Counter the ill effects of mistaking recordings for music by never listening to it twice, or in Kayn's case, if you're going to listen to some of your own music, cue it up on several varispeed decks and maybe hit record

now that we've got a host of his post-retirement 2003 pieces up we get a sense of self-remixing & Ilse even used the term 'plunderphonia' herself in the bandcamp notes for 'Sound-Hydra' (whole lot of Stockhausen's 'Microphonie II' and Xenakis 'Legende d'eer' in part 3, and... well, sounds an awful lot like he's recording himself listening to 'Tektra' again. Which, if Neu! 2 is the most infuential Neu! for you, is emotional)

In other words, even if I've been a little underwhelmed by the 2003 stuff so far I still love it all. And it illuminates the connections between sampling & feedback music that tie together Schaeffer & the Barrons / all the earliest roots of electronic music

good answer! truth is, I still haven't listened to the entirety of scanning or milky way of sound more than two or three times each but I do like dipping into jump off points in those sets semi-randomly from time-to-time and just letting it wash over me for an hour or two. embrace the mystery!

"This CD edition offers Tektra digitally for the first time in consistent channel order with Etoral and Rhenit in their original positions and uncut, revealing almost five additional minutes of music that was not available in digital format until now."

https://kayn.nl/shop/cds/tektra-2021/

Infra is finally getting a CD reissue + O'Rourke remaster! This is the one I've been anticipating the most; the vinyl rip I have sounds awe-inspiring as usual for him, but it's sill a surface-noisy vinyl rip.

https://kayn.nl/shop/cds/infra-2022-remaster/

Nice - thanks for the update! And I totally missed that "Tektra" was re-issued, too! TAKE MY MONEY, KAYN FAMILY!!!

Bandcamp did a nice spotlight on his work today