Roland Kayn

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