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15CD BOX
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FR 025-039CD
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Returning to the unreleased oeuvre of the master of cybernetic sound Roland Kayn, Frozen Reeds hereby unveils a new high watermark for longform electroacoustic composition, unfolding across 15 CDs in a luxurious gold-stamped boxed set. With Jim O'Rourke applying his signature restorative touch to the audio, and Robert Beatty taking his cryptic cybernetics-inspired artwork several steps beyond the label's previous Kayn box, The Ortho-Project (2007) finally sees a fitting release. In 1970, Roland Kayn began a decades-long period of research, development and creation at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht. In the mid to late '90s, Kayn retired, relocated to the Dutch countryside, and began to realize new electronic works at Reiger Recording Studio -- his modest home facility. "I finally came to the conclusion," he would later point out, "that I no longer needed studios to construct my own electronic music." The working methods Kayn arrived at individually -- without the room-filling synthesizers, mixing desks and signal-processing equipment of Sonology at his disposal -- saw him turning his own career into a cybernetic process. From the hours of recorded sound amassed in prior decades, he began processing and assembling a mountainous quantity of new music. His works of this period are focused on reabsorbing and recontextualizing his life's work to produce yet another series of utterly alien landscapes. From his retirement until his death in 2011, Kayn was wildly prolific, leaving an archive of dozens of finished electronic pieces. Earlier source material is often resculpted using the technology Kayn had available to hand, while other techniques such as sampling radio broadcasts or the plunderphonic quotation of others' works occasionally intercede. No notes accompany any of this music -- no word of explanation or expression of intent. Only the works and their titles remain, the latter often simply deepening the mystery. Their durations range from around 20 minutes to almost 18 hours. The Ortho-Project, presented here in its entirety, is among the longest. At this scale, Kayn's music is perhaps at its most immersive; the listener senses they are being invited to envelope themselves in a rich environment of diverse timbral physicality rather than a programmatic work. This is simply electronic music as you have never experienced it before.
"The mystery, the grace, the boundless invention -- Kayn's machine music is a vast catalogue of very human wonder." --The Guardian
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3LP BOX
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DS 036LP
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First in the series of LP boxsets documenting the birth of Roland Kayn's cybernetic music. One of the great pioneers of electronic, computer, and instrumental avant-garde music, for the majority of his life, the German composer Roland Kayn remained almost entirely unknown, a founding member of the legendary ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, heralded as a singular genius by a small number of figures like Jim O'Rourke. Though the composer was included within Deutsche Grammophon's seminal Avant-Garde series during the early 1970s, it wasn't until 2017, six years after his death, that the ranks of his fans began to noticeably swell, following the release of his monumental work, A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound by Frozen Reeds (FR 007-022CD, 2017). Die Schachtel present a reissue here of Simultan, an overwhelmingly important work in his canon, from 1977, stretching across three LPs. While Roland Kayn might be easily described as a composer of electronic, electro-acoustic, or computer music, the majority of his career was in fact largely dedicated to the revolutionary sculpting of an entirely new territory of sound: cybernetic music, a generative process of composition through programming. Simultan was among the first of the composer's works to emerge from this process. Cybernetic music grew from Kayn's longstanding engagement and fascination with data processing theory. This territory of creativity was the composer's attempt to allow sound to be self-sufficient, stripping away notions of harmony, melody, and rhythm, deploying complex networks of electronic devices. Created during the period in which Kayn was living in the Netherlands and recorded with the assistance of electronic music legends Jaap Vink and Leo Küpper, Simultan is filled with a remarkable sense of humanity and touch. The sounds on Simultan range from seductive ambiences, grinding swells of atonally and pure texture, to buried tone clusters. "The mystery, the grace, the boundless invention -- Kayn's machine music is a vast catalogue of very human wonder." --The Guardian Remastered from the original analog master tapes. Includes booklet with new liner notes. Includes printed inner sleeves. Standard edition comes in an edition of 400.
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16CD BOX
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FR 007-022CD
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Sold out, no repress currently planned. Frozen reeds presents the première release of Roland Kayn's 14-hour masterpiece, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, as a 16-CD boxed set. Roland Kayn's truly epic A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound is both a major late opus and a summation of his vast contribution to the fields of electronic music and composition. Hearing the briefest passage of this piece, assembled in 2009, is enough to date the material of which it is composed back to the era of Kayn's noteworthy LP boxed sets, released on the Colosseum label in the late '70s and early '80s. Kayn's so-called "cybernetic music," to use the term he preferred, resolutely refuses to showcase the methods employed in its creation. The mass of logical interactions and correspondences underpinning the sounds are submerged so deeply below the surface as to defy analysis. One is left only with the results, which grant the listener a profound and unique experience. With A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, Kayn provides both a vast sonic territory and the invitation to explore it. From glacial, drone-like vistas to violent staccato sequences, the piece's 22 movements chart the length and breadth of electronic music in as comprehensive a manner as has ever been attempted. The resurgence of the modular synthesizer as a popular musical tool in recent years belies the possibility that its boldest virtuosi may already lie in the instrument's past. In his work in Europe's electronic music studios alongside colleagues such as Leo Küpper and Jaap Vink, Kayn created sonic textures in such abundant variety as to make genre-categorization redundant. Photographs of the one-off, hand-built systems upon which they were realized have inspired the awe of electronic-music connoisseurs for years, but their output has been all too little heard and appreciated. In 2017, Roland Kayn represents perhaps one of the last titanic figures of 20th-century music to receive their due recognition, and to have their vital music restored to availability. Fresh from its 2016 release of Julius Eastman's Femenine (FR 006CD), which spurred on its composer's wider rediscovery and gave rise to performances, broadcasts, and festivals devoted to his work around the world, frozen reeds is proud to initiate the first stage of a similar process for Roland Kayn, which his incredible music so richly deserves. Edition of 750. Audio restoration by Jim O'Rourke. Artwork by Robert Beatty.
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