Roland Kayn Daily 2025 / a track and/or work from Roland Kayn each day.

• these are my notes & thoughts, which may be shifted, adjusted, or edited over time.
  
• i’ll be listening to The Ortho-Project collection on weekends until i run out of the series which should be about 2-3 months into the year. info on it can be found at Discogs or frozen reeds & appears to be in stock for anyone interested.

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Roland Kayn - Agila

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• slow strings haunt from some other place, ascending, descending, little path to them, following no progression or melodic center seemingly…no less effective for drawing the ear of course. until about 6:20 in, when standard orchestral clangs and clinks enter, the recordings from Kayn’s vault perhaps. he smears these of course with some portion of his studio, and they twist into something else. eventually voices are heard at first just in resonant shaping of the strings, then suddenly in stark twisted voices. only briefly have we heard this before it the piece harkens back to the strings, then stretched subtleties, becoming some drone of differing tones. suddenly a huge chord piece begins, a wall of sound heard for a time, letting the listener inspect and yet be stopped in one’s tracks. softness and tape spins continue to morph and explore, then leave to be forgotten. about 22:30 we get a small simple rhythmic piece from Kayn, uncommon among this era for sure, with it stopped quickly by a whistle. tonal shifting, scattering, pieces unheard except for their shadows. a drone overtakes the main soundscape again, briefly. fading back into the washes of small subtlety, every few minutes we get insertions of louder & more harsh TV style switching and shaking and turning over, no ending or direction. nonetheless the drones and shifting continue in varying lengths and depths around the listener, through time. after a voice breaks in one final time, we have a climax some minutes before the end, with the final minutes hearkening back to the first few, a solo string sound moving sadly, calmly.
  

• a focus on collections of spaces and ideas briefly visited.
  

• features string sounds in solo shapeless melody, drone sections, harsher noises and a few rare nearly-clear vocal snippets of spoken words.

  • 59:25 - released via Bandcamp November 5, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 10

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 15-01, 20. Arttiraes

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• over 14 hours spread across 15 CDs, concluding here with Arttiraes. almost 8 minutes into the piece before it truly jumps off to fly, the first minutes skittering in uncertain paths, no pattern, no movement but searching. but with flight it finds some semblance of self, Kayn’s given it some wings. with it, more searching, subtle life movements. about 12 minutes in it’s found a new height but here it fights against something. its own self, maybe? light distance reverberations slowly waving beneath. Kayn brings in some obvious string sounds and other rushes as it moves towards the 15 minute mark, and a voice within is trying to understand, to express. 20 minutes in and it’s begun to fall over/into itself quickly, sputtering flesh writhing. strings lay beneath it all though, and it rises above and around, just eyes now, eyes and wings. hovering, floating, gliding softly. the listener the subject of its gaze, its center. it drifts and closes in, the drifting back up and around again, catching the minuscule, the movement below. mechanical sounds rise and shift, digital blurring, analog smearing, glass breaking caught in time and suspended infinitely by Kayn’s hands here, somehow becoming a trigger for some crash resembling an attempt at replicating an orchestra’s bombast for just a few moments. noise of exhaust, of exhaustion perhaps, intermittently form around the tapeshifting tones and semblance of conventional musical forms. lumbering, it rises, emits tones softly echoing some lost sad snippet of a melody unremembered. Kayn’s letting small pieces be the focus for a moment, we seem to be back on the ground, and these pieces are shifting. some digital trigger is tripped, impending tone changes, small drifting smeared echoes again and again, drawn out and brought in. in the last 3 minutes Kayn lets the tension rise again, the volume swells pulling from out of emptiness, the fountains of noise and life seeping out. echoes and tones caught in the machine briefly, the digital twisting tape ending it all, just a tag of moments skittering around for the last seconds of the final piece.
  

• “orthos” has its etymologic root in Greek of being ‘straight, true, correct, regular’ with some related words tying to ‘high, steep’ in other languages. at any number of times in the series the sense of being high above, looking down upon the sound sources, has been prominent. if this was Kayn’s meaning, we’ll surely never know, of course. but much of the closer Arttiraes heard here seems close to that, the first two acts of it coming to us from on high.
  

• a focus on small movements around and within, exploratory and simple in subtle revelations.
  

• features small moments of digital bleed interspersed, tapeshifts, mechanical hisses occasionally, lots of small swelling and drifting layers.

  • 45:09 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 09

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 14-02, 19. Zazorith

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• a loud start to this one, proclaiming its place, finding its breadth, its skin, its shape. undulation underlies all though, as the raucous moments fade, the layers beneath reveal themselves to be just as unnerving on their own. these stretch in tone often, being a key component of the first act. the second act seems to grow from out of this, with a low drum hit barely heard signaling some change. melancholy strings are layered somehow in front of and behind the low undulation layer, briefly, to be then replaced by clinking glass moments, noisy spinning moments, creeping up and around suddenly, overtaking the soundfield. within the ears briefly, the tendrils have touched our brain itself. the second act fades as some buzzing insect-like metallic creation takes form. the undulation lowers significantly in tone, shifting us down, levels down, into some place filled with water. the buzzing spins again, lower, larger now. bass waves resonating throughout the expanse. the undulation layer is seemingly gone, evaporated, incorporated into the waters around, all still now? it’s unclear where we are, where we were. Kayn’s truly left all touchpoints of reality and perhaps even humanity behind with these pieces of The Ortho-Project. everything we experience gets interpreted as fear, as alien, because our reference points are so far removed. to truly experience the other, be enveloped by it in waves like this, how does one process this? explain? even remember, perhaps, can one remember the things experienced when they were so foreign? people explaining religious or spiritual experiences or contacts, so-called alien encounters, etc., protagonists in weird fiction? how do they put into words the unknowable, the unknown, the reality they feel but was in so many, many ways removed from normal reality? please excuse the tangential rumination here, it felt important to briefly explore in relation to The Ortho-Project as it winds down, concluding tomorrow. Zazorith spins near and far around the listener, within the ears and the skull again, truly all-encompassing and enveloping in sound in the last minute. the thickness of tone and field Kayn achieved there was overwhelming. a stellar piece.
  

• a focus on layers of reality being penetrated and removed from around, revealing some other place beneath, within.
  

• features loud noisy moments with underlying waves undulating slowly, changing tone as Kayn lowers us deeper within, with brief moments of a drum, long stretches of invasive tones, dark, and enveloping.

  • 30:06 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 08

Roland Kayn - Sezarytes

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a cinematic start, somehow cleaner and in a more considered, almost more ‘mature’ form being tracked out, Kayn’s seemingly at the height of something here. he’s combining many of the techniques discussed before, but using them expertly at each and every moment. drama continually pressure & always at the focus, heightened through the first half here. we get more and more voices, tension, buzzing after the halfway point, getting downright climactic about 26:00 in, strings stretched through tape, reverberated & pulled apart, abandoned when some crashing new aspecty is brought in, pulling the listener down with it under duress, under the thumb of some oppression of emotion or machinery, political actor, who knows. Kayn’s pulled out all the stops to unsettle us, maybe even himself? he’s so often tapping into things we can only speculate on, feeling so often removed from a standard emotion or experience. nonetheless moments of calm do appear within, moments of waves lapping turn out to be just noise itslef being spun in Kayn’s manipulation. with nerves on edge and emotions running fast, Kayn’s not slowing down for some minutes it seems. even when he lets the main elements pause, there’s buzzing, or trailing sounds, lingering pieces moving slightly. but the last 15 minutes are dominated by sharp recurrences of striking noise. Kayn’s going for maximum funneling towaeds the listener.
  

• a focus on dramatic swings & then tension + drama, noisy sections punctuating and carrying things through with confidence & power.
  

• features screeches and noise at sudden moments, often resembling other works from this period w/ the sounds actually used, strings and spun voices, percussive bells, distant winds.

  • 40:28 - released via Bandcamp March 7, 2025
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 07

Roland Kayn - Oktrol, 02. Oktrol Pt. 2

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• noisy tone wire calmly stretching itself, looping around and winding ahead, twisting, with layrs contained yet singular. just as this begins to expand, a crash and new strange aspects are within the space. clanging & smashing in something of a regular pattern, Kayn’s not letting the strangeness of Oktrol Pt. 1 go unanswered here. the beginning noisy wire is suddenly snipped, and the underlying bed of rumbles and worldsounds takes prominence briefly. meandering and eventually fading to near silence near the 11:00 mark, a new place is found, a new background layer introduced and explored, winds are heard, new scattered tones are heard far distant. small moments of movement, small echoing feedback, small displacements of the space are stitched in by Kayn, the shape of this piece beginning to resemble Pt. 1, if with some different sounds and manipulations employed. some time after the 30 minute mark we hear a less noisy version of the tone wire from the intro again, looping us back around in some sense, but from there we get a rising drama harkening back to Oktrol Pt. 1, blurred but nonetheless filled with clanging pianos and noises panning around us, rhythmic clanging. softly phased tonal noise spins slowly around until it fades to close out the piece.
  

• a focus on uncertainty in small ways in new and shifting places, in tiny corners and fearful open fields.
  

• features noisy tonal shearing, long stretches of quiet & distant small sounds, echoes of Pt. 1.

  • 40:28 - released via Bandcamp May 5, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 06

Roland Kayn - Oktrol, 01. Oktrol Pt. 1

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• right into the middle of the soundscape, with regular bouts of clicking occupying some vague time-keeping on this piece. we’ve not seen many pieces with regular rhythmic components, but even this one is as fleeting that then others. we begin to start getting small sounds, changing tones and echoing and cutting frequency shifts, soft, calmer moments between… but Kayn keeps it moving in this direction with slowed strings and minimal tape sound influence. instead he’s pushing for washes of smoothed over sounds creating a bed of moving tonality. some small rushes and peaks within the runtime, but overall he keeps those first few minutes as the most chaotic and heavy. the ending swells in some complexity after hearing the clicking rhythmic sounds appearing briefly a few times…Kayn’s raising the piece again with its newly learned attitude and design, bringing it to a new harsher ending for
  

• a focus on a chaotic start that falls slowly into more measured and comfortable in its own skin.
  

• features slow strings and shifting frequencies, some light musical and story progression here.

  • 32:45 - released via Bandcamp May 5, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 05

Roland Kayn - Yellowings Conglomerations, 02. Yellowings Conglomerations Pt. 2

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a continuation of some of the vibe found in Part 1., slow and scraping, reverberant and echoing. with larger passages obviously pulling from sample sources, Kayn’s tape manipulation is here on display, and worth noting that there’s a lot of subtle clean movement from that aspect in particular. any number of metallic resonances, bells, vocal snippets, orchestral moments, and others are brought in here briefly and interweaved into the tapestry of delays and reverbs the piece is buried under. two strong pieces.
  

• a focus on a more tense version of part 1, some calmness but more uncertainty buried within.
  

• features slow drifting pulses with calm strings and tense strings, numerous different bits of small sources from more complex recordings, pieces of life soundss, etc.

  • 45:02 - released via Bandcamp February 3, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 04

Roland Kayn - Yellowings Conglomerations, 01. Yellowings Conglomerations Pt. 1

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• slow and pulsing like a body the size of a city, rising, falling, warm & endless. no silence is heard, there’s always some sound, some rumble, some clanging or distant whining, always around and beneath. Kayn does bring in more sounds throughout this piece, snippets of orchestral flourishes, the sounds of voices, the echoes of movements whose sources are lost or were never known. paces quicken and slow, never topping, never losing energy, never losing touch with the past, with some future. Kayn’s controlled and subdued through and through here, creating a unique experience amongst this era of his material, perhaps the simplest and most calming version of that which still fell heavily in what’s clearly his comfort zone. the piece ends with loud rising nearness of water flowing, of whistles, of haphazardly chosen but quaint small chords rang, in careening reverberations of some alleyway.
  

• a focus on subtle, calm comfort of some known space of nearness, of home.
  

• features slow pulses of bass & soft, calming tones, occasional snippets of voices, small bits of life and movement around and within.

  • 39:57 - released via Bandcamp February 3, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 03

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 14-01, 18. La Grada

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• ominous slow rolling in & rising of the sounds from far away, voices are heard within. the swells drop and rise again and again, with sounds of shattering glass, stretched worlds, even whistling heard within. this continues in waves for first 2/3rds of the piece, but begins to subdue in tone and regularity as the 3rd movement begins a subtle background layer of swirling, and stark high pitched stringlike tones rising and breaking, twisting, shifting around. distorted pieces, crushed sections, footseteps, darkness approaching, scraping metal, all encircle and rush towards as the end approaches. a dark piece all around.
  

• a focus on growing dread & a sense of approaching inevitability.
  

• features voices, stretched sources, distortions, feedback dynamics.

  • 29:27 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 02

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 13-01, 17. Ecardy

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• within the spinning, squealing tape sounds that have been key to The Ortho-Project pieces there lies buried a changing tonal progression, becoming most prominent about 9 minutes in. by about 12 minutes into the piece we’ve started to drift off to some new layer. tonal aspects resembling vocal shapes are hear, with a distant wind instrument scale being played. low frequency notes emphasize the dramatic moments throughout the piece thus far. 14 minutes in and Kayn’s employing more obvious sound source oddities, separating the listener from the beginning ideas into this new place. heavily broken transmissions break through, stretch, their source might as well be another galaxy, they’re so twisted away from intelligible. the journey away continues as we are pulled towards some central mass that distorts the tones, crushes the dynamics, smears the silences into another’s memories. small moments within are briefly terrifying, sometimes gentle, but full of drama here around this new place as we near the halfway point of the piece’s runtime. we are snapped directly against the central mass we’ve been careening towards, Kayn pushing the volume as high as he ever has. then removed, quiet tones & spins for some minutes, beginning to know the path ahead. slow moving for some time but still in search, Kayn finds a new center to twist around as he nears the 40 minute mark. rich, fearful strings slither around us as we gravitate towards, then away again. he finds a melodic progression again here, amidst some shimmering glass & warping synthesizer sounds. the final minutes find Kayn relying heavily on feedback sounds, of the more tonal & metallic variety. this feels unique in The Ortho-Project so far, both the feedback & the more melodic tonal sections, however brief they may be here. the piece ends with a survey of delayed percussive blips & reverberation quickly fading from its newfound face & form.
  

• a focus on a moving center, a searching path, journeying.
  

• features some moments of tonal melodies, string portions, metallic shimmers, spinning tapes.

  • 57:04 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on March 01

Roland Kayn - Transit

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• the first six minute section of this feels self contained, and is quite jarring to center around such a particular & distinct (if underwhelming) melody. a slow rumble of a 3 minute piece follows. then another section with a melody prominent over layers of grain & reversed effects…the melody differs from the one heard in the first minutes of Transit, but seems to be the same instrument (perhaps even the same recording?). a number of these smaller pieces appear and fade out throughout Transit; though the final half falls towards the skittering space found in the final minutes, rushes of wind intermittent, low rumble of a moving world, digital bubbles echoing and triggering resonances. like looking out on an expanse of seemingly still water in some underground cave system the, only to realize the water is flowing and uncertain in its patterns, causing wind around, causing echoes, reflections, fear at the containment of the space, awe at the alien world around. this piece felt out of place from much of the RRR 2000s works, sounding almost like more standard modern experimental/ambient that one might hear on a netlabel of the era. eventually guiding itself towards more of Kayn’s expected style of the time, even then it wasn’t full of the whipping tape spins & techniques he’d use prominently, excessively, in creating the bulk of his more wild and untamed pieces.
  

• a focus on rumbling depths within and without, vignettes of layering sweetness & pensiveness, with underlying fear of an unknown path ahead.
  

• features a more subdued tone overall, with skittering digital corners, prominent melodies in parts, rushes of wind appearing and fading, low rumbles and distinct smaller sections within the larger piece.

  • 39:30 - released via Bandcamp August 31, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 28

Roland Kayn - Metaphysis Pt. 4

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• noise and shattering glass twist around and within each other again and again in a dance of reformation and destruction, sudden starts and silent distance between births. soaring strings are brought in and tamed at times, digital flutters, scraping, shattering glass, distorted or reverberating, each its own haunting soundscape, all unmoving but still traveling. the listener doesn’t move, but the world around us is moved. soft sweet strings intermittently appear and turn to scarring our minds with their ending each time, the sweetness falling into the center of the spinning cycle of time playing out aurally around us. it all becomes more unsettled, seemingly pinned down here to this place in some way, as the world moves in time, twists slowly underneath, night into day, slowly around the sun we move and witness this final piece of Metaphysis that Kayn’s crafted. sounds in reverse, echoes in feedback, sheer essence of it all under glass, all the sounds of its shattering forming the looming presence of Part 4. crashes, distortion are brought in for the final minutes, screams and tearing apart, the creation choosing not to exist any longer by its own hands, Kayn perhaps unable to control it any more.
  

• a focus on a pinned placement, and the spinning, tearing, fighting, and expression within that confinement.
  

• features glass scraping and breaking, sheer metallic pieces, distortions, start-stops and silences between often, moments of sweet strings, a slowed siren sound is heard hidden within as well.

  • 43:49 - released via Bandcamp November 1, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 27

Roland Kayn - Metaphysis Pt. 3

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• part 3 starts with more start-stop dynamics, but the high-pitched whines, the digital blurring, the tape spinning sounding like some rushing wind all suggests some sort of spinning, cornerless machine hovering, turning, pulsing. a few times throughout the piece there’s a distinct pause in the sounds, which feels like the machine is resetting, coming out of the pause with some new unbridled energy, screeching & pulling some voices of its makers from within and twisting them into its own attempt at communication of anger or pain or some unknown machine experience. the spinning metal sounds begin to resonate and trigger some unknown new depth in the last minutes of the piece, high pitched skittering pecking and weaving around, or perhaps within. the space within the space. so far each part of Metaphysis is more enjoyable than the last, and it does feel like it’s building somehow, maybe there’s some narrative arc to this all, in some musical compositional sense at least?
  

• a focus on some incomprehensible feeling of unknowing confidence of self reflection & dread.
  

• features spinning metallic sounds, screeching voices, circling animalistic skittering, rushing energy, with stark unexpected cuts of silence & re-entry.

  • 25:55 - released via Bandcamp November 1, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 26

Roland Kayn - Metaphysis Pt. 2

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a fearful/fear-inducing & jagged start-stop first few minutes, Kayn is putting the listener (or the track itself?) in a place of unknowing & uncertainty. a decidedly more focused start that part 1 was overall, and though a variety of sound sources seem to have been used, it doesn’t feel as disjointed as Pt. 1 did. flooding & crushing moments of sound from unseen sources still briefly pummel the listener & push us away & around. this drifts into more stark start-stop attacks of huge chords, or skittering strange digital moments turning into more ominous, scraping & posturing. the levels are reset constantly, the brain is reformed with each start, with each extended silence, with each new cacophony. Kayn’s pushing himself and us and unafraid of letting the ideas and sounds happen however they may.
  

• a focus on fear of a new place, a new world, a new existence, the start-stop pattern of knowledge and testing for knowledge of the unknown
  

• features vocal aspects, large string ensembles, skittering & digital noise, reverberating silences between moments, droning basses, heavy crashing.

  • 26:57 - released via Bandcamp November 1, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 25

Roland Kayn - Metaphysis Pt. 1

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• moments and moments wash over, new visions, new places, new ideas, old ideas, all offered up briefly, some more obviously close to the source material than others, so snippets of trains, speaking, string sections, etc. are pushed through Kayn’s ringer of equipment and tapes. a connection between doesn’t seem to be charted, feeling as near to haphazard or imprecise as any piece heard so far in the listening this year. some moments are dramatic, some noisy, some sweet, some processing source materials in interesting ways, but few, if any, throughlines between these separate places is found. that may be the point of course, Kayn might be taking this approach for good reason, but as of the first part of Metaphysis here, it’s hard to say that it’s working to produce much narrative or intricacy, or even interest to be quite honest.
  

• a focus on minute experiences tested & introduced, with no clear path through the din & cacophony of the experience.
  

• features numerous small snippets of varying audio sources in a scattershot approach, rarely any repeated in any meaningful way.

  • 43:12 - released via Bandcamp November 1, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 24

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 12-02, 16. Antegry

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• starting from where Sonoritys left off with stabs, playful violin notes, industrial noises, drifting pads, all overlayed, swallowing the last moments, spitting out some new one. near & distant squelching, tearing, feedback building, sweeping suddenly, then ending. echoing & reverberating, the structure of this piece, the space of it, is large & shifting but not infinite. the center of it is uncertain. in the last few minutes things slow to a near stop, softly walking in the tension remaining. a new small sound is found & spun up, honed in on. is this the center searched for? it triggers new mechanisms, new aggressions, unknown aspects of the previous moments. born from the time before, perhaps. it all skitters and whines, spins away and stops.
  

• “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 14-hour 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.”
  

• a quick few words about The Ortho-Project as a whole as it nears completion: the wording above from the promo marketing for The Ortho-Project about lack of information other than the sound and the given titles feels quite fitting. there’s so little tied to…human experience, at least directly, at the surface, it’s hard to try and explain or understand in that sort of context. writing words & notes about experiences so removed from normal human expression is quite an undertaking, i think i can say without hesitation now after 50+ days of doing so. not all is so separated from direct human expression, of course, but much is, and the earlier stuff was also leaning towards that in its own ways, if not fully there yet. The Ortho-Project seems quite separate from current human experience, with only shards & glimmers of music, sounds, & voice occurring scattered throughout. it feels almost like some future retrospective art installation; a view of the human from an outside perspective; a summation of the modern human era’s musical edges repurposed through a growing machine’s own artist interpretation as they study the world that existed before them, that birthed them. awkward descriptors aside, the distance between pieces like this 14 hour journey and centuries-old symphonies or even modern experimental explorations is nearly all cases quite vast: Kayn’s work of this period is truly distinct, unique, & separate. alien.
  

• a focus on a search it’s unclear is completed, a way of seeking for something we’re not expected to understand or even glimpse.
  

• features many stark moments & decaying, self-fed echoing.

  • 20:03 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 23

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 12-01, 15. Sonoritys

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• a quiet and soft introduction drifts quickly into atonal chord swells & decays. feeding back into itself, echoing its past, it grows & slowly pumps, using a noisy essence as its blood, finding new sounds to incorporate constantly. reversing, falling out, clinks, bells, chimes, unknown scrapes & pressures fill the soundfield as it recycles & repurposes all around it into itself. integration of all into the central circle, acting as a gravity, a planet. even with this tracking throughout, small moments between roils are heard in tiny scrapes, small echoes, little flourishes. often crushed & reverberating, tearing at the maxima, never leaving, never sleeping, just rolling and churning. the last act of the piece Kayn allows the volume & aggression to push the piece heavily, tapes squealing, sounds distorting again & again. it ends like this, abruptly, suddenly leaving. on its face, “Sonoritys” might have some relation to the “Sonority ERT” piece released via Bandcamp, though they are listed as quite far apart in their conception year, & there’s no obvious immediate tells of relation in their soundscapes.
  

• a focus on a growing pulsing mass of crushing volume, hunger, feeding.
  

• features a number of swelling, sonorous resonances, pushing & echoing.

  • 41:33 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 22

Roland Kayn - Simultan, 06. Invarianten

• 1974 Realisation: Instituut Voor Sonologie, Studio De Recherches Et De Structuration Électroniques Auditives, composed 1970-1972

• “Cybernetic music is decisively determined by process planning, at regulating and control processes according to certain criteria that depend alternately on each other. Characteristic for this planning are the circle relations, i.e. that during the information flow of signs or signals (electro-acoustical switching circuits) there will occur backsignals relating to one programme which can accordingly control the future process. Beginning with my first instrumental-cybernetic works, Galaxis and Allotropie of the years 1962-64 up to Simultan (1970-72) the criterium was determining for the process planning as can be seen from an entropy maximum - i.e. a nearly equal repartition and probability of signs and signals - where by means of preliminarily given control processes the receiver-information is not predisposed, but at the moment of the cooperation of multiple control systems it is derived during realisation. The claim for the future should be to invent systems which put the organic and automatic regulating processes into a more close and more direct contact to each other. However, the use of exclusively machinery-cybernetic systems within the compository process planning should only be interesting for the establishment of the basic models. The direct sound production with these means on the basis of computer controlled oscillating circles leads, as this has already been evident in the primary stage of the electronic music of the fifties, to a reduction of the psychoacoustical perception channel. –Roland Kayn” -(formatting removed, translated, lightly edited)
  

• a slow and quiet digital start, for minutes drifting softly…eventually nearing towards some far off machine churning steady, wind in the ears as we travel nearby, towards, around, are exposed to the different corners of the structure. very much an outside-looking-in start to this final piece of Simultan. of note, the different releases of this album/piece have had different ordering of the pieces…one would assume due to the limitations of vinyl? the ordering given here is claimed to be the ‘intended’ order. suddenly we’re dropped deeper and deeper into the heard of the churning engine, then even more suddenly it’s behind us. passing through electrical resonances, high pitched, oscillating, tuning dropping as our spatial reality shifts around, truly feeling like a journey, a siren decaying as you speed past it. moving around, past, it seems to be moving underground, or understructure, at some point, is the direction Kayn is taking the listener. the final minutes are a rising tone, dropping down below, around some central elevator or staircase. speeding and slowing as the listener is dropped down further into the underbelly of the machinespace. greeted here with spinning, warping time, particles spin around & sing in their atonal voices, from within or shaping the air their moving through, trying to communicate with us. trying to welcome us, warn us? we’re absorbed under, something else is overtaking, becoming us.
  

• the Simultan pieces do feel quite different from much of Kayn’s later work heard so far, but does seem in line with his early journey in the cybernetic music conception outlined above from the liner notes of the initial vinyl works. by making the process so encompassing but seemingly separated from the human in much of its methods and behavior, Kayn’s work here truly does feel otherworldly, inhuman, in varying ways. though of course much of his touch is still within, and we’ve heard much human emotion throughout the pieces as well. the music is Kayn’s, but the methods of composition & recording & manipulation often lean heavily on these pregnant repositories of potential energy & sound, waiting to spring & burst forth with just a touch.
  

• a focus on journey through imagined, unknown, unrealizable machinery & structures.
  

• features eletrical & mechanistic spinning & oscillating, quiet soft winds of travel sections, descent & siren-like warnings.

  • 25:209 - released via Colosseum, 1977
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 21

Roland Kayn - Simultan, 05. Matrix

• 1974 Realisation: Instituut Voor Sonologie, Studio De Recherches Et De Structuration Électroniques Auditives, composed 1970-1972

• “simultan is produced against the prevailing compulsions of production ­– performance ­– consumptions.” -(formatting removed, translated)
  

• slow soft noises enter, rhythmics skittering and rustling. the impression of a radio changing stations is clear, but this sounds like clearly digital design, perhaps direct synthesis of some sort. feedback steers itself upwards and around the listener, at moments not unlike a guitar feedback whine, but in essence a richer & less anticipatory/harsh version. bits of high frequency sound are tamed but not fully, repeating but never quite just a loop, it falls and stutters. rises and decays loudly, in the listeners face, scraping and stealing. channels are feeding different worlds into each ear, creating some new one in the mind of the listener. low rumbles, high pitched whines, digital noise, a measured & channeled cacophony, a guided tour by way of some unknown city aflame.
  

• a focus on a designed & crafted dissonant way ahead, around, back into the past, into the self that entered. the same or changed it matters not,
  

• features digital noise, rhythmic crunching, decaying slowly, quickly, all around

  • 22:25 - released via Colosseum, 1977
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 20

Roland Kayn - Simultan, 04. Logatome

• 1974 Realisation: Instituut Voor Sonologie, Studio De Recherches Et De Structuration Électroniques Auditives, composed 1970-1972

• “simultaneous is no concrete ­– electronic — computer music ­– quite on the contrary a music between these scopes: cybernetic music. The acoustic signals produced by a number of x sound sources, which were unforeseeable in their chronological sequence, have been referred to an information-esthetical reality, not to a numeral reality, by means of preliminarily given or self-stabilizing adjustable res. control circles and multiply reproduced micro-esthetic single operation.” -(formatting removed, translated)
  

• low, calm tones enter and fade into what reveals itself to be vocal sounds, twisted and processed by some unimaginable process for the time period…digital crunches and skitters appear, and somewhere along the path Kayn’s picked up some high frequency trailing tones. vocals or vocal-like patterns bubble up regularly throughout the next few minutes, as we hear Kayn testing out his swelling, cresting, waves of volume & intensity of layered noises & tones. blurred & layered & effected vocals begin to dominate the piece, though noisy & drifting tones still undulate & pump. the bubbling & tones fade themselves into oblivion.
  

• a focus on subtle changing tones dragging the listener along, haunted by ghosts & creatures.
  

• features slow tonalities with layers of effected vocal components.

  • 29:07 - released via Colosseum, 1977
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 19

Roland Kayn - Simultan, 02. Sources Ergodiques, Parts 1 & 2

• 1974 Realisation: Instituut Voor Sonologie, Studio De Recherches Et De Structuration Électroniques Auditives, composed 1970-1972

• “simultan is exclusively conceived towards h e a r i n g : between … - hearing and pick-up detecting sounding balancing listening into it over-hearing hearing listening up to subsiding to hear are existing the most various hybrids of the auditive behaviour which are obligatory for the perception of this music.” -(formatting removed, translated)
  

• rising, rising, rising, building, sheer tones, stretched waves, scattered & bubbling digital detritus. after some minutes the digital begins to overtake the Shepard tone (or Shepard tone-adjacent) illusions. it might be worth noting that these are seemingly designed for ‘rooms’ per the titling on the physical packaging…rooms adjacent, connected? this one would be busy and unrelenting room to enter, at least compared to much of Monostabile. this piece certainly seems geared by an approach lined out in the quoted text above; ‘conceived towards hearing’ seems a pretty convoluted phrase by itself, but in the midst of these pieces, it starts to make some strange sense…there’s little to gather from the form of this piece, perhaps, but much, much, much to be captured in the sounds and otherworldly processing applied. the isolated vocals begin to increase and morph. the digitals drop in & out, scraping at the floor, the walls, the sky. unstoppable & endlessly allowed to test & iterate, create.
  

• a focus on redirecting the inevitable, reassessing the untouchable past
  

• features Shepard tone-type frequency swells & losses, bubbling digital layers

  • 35:28 - released via Colosseum, 1977
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 18

Roland Kayn - Simultan, 01. Monostabile

• 1974 Realisation: Instituut Voor Sonologie, Studio De Recherches Et De Structuration Électroniques Auditives, composed 1970-1972

• one of Kayn’s earlier cybernetic works, and seemingly his first major physically released collection, Simultan starts out with a very strong first section, Monostabile. the first ~6:30 is silent-to-strong rising play of sound, often with deep register frequencies filling the ears (or rooms, as it seems to have been designed for in the liner notes), but with subtlety and restraint and slow build that Kayn didn’t often employ in his later works, at least in ways like this. near silence leads to some rising tones, some watery pulsing rhythmics, and a sudden, briefly haunting mechanized voice. from here the drowned beat eventually returns in some clearer, harsher forms, with feedback sounds and disconnected spaces impressed upon. a rising smashing that sounds at once as if it’s underwater (again) and that it’s glass being smashed moves the piece into a place leaving just a high frequency tone. a new pseudo-mechanical rhythmic loop forms itself and slightly shifts for some minutes. the piece strays towards highly…digital? electronic? modern? sounds, and intense layering of sounds at moments, with more sparse times allowing for focus on the (at the time at least) new sounds Kayn’s employing here. he is clearly not short on ideas or passion for stitching together sounds in new and intriguing ways.
  

• a focus on a pushing of the listener away or towards some unknown place, time, or reaction to the sounds within.
  

• features phasing separation between channels, repetitive looping, brief moments of altered vocals, extensive layering of sounds in some sections/

  • 27:48 - released via Colosseum, 1977
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 17

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 11-01, 14. Rantho

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• Rantho begins with masterful light, slow swelling with high frequencies tipping off some harshness is to follow. quickened skittering interjects at surprising moments, loud & violent, with breathing rests between. the first ~6:30 calms and fades to silence, to have some approach reset, some dynamics reassessed…mechanics begin to be introduced and given prominence and spotlight, shifting from left to right. cutting out, echoing feedbacks stand out from Kayn’s other approach in The Ortho-Project so far; this could be a piece moving towards the climax of the series as there’s only a few more left in the series. eventually we hear the return of the high frequency floating piece as heard at the very start. along with some vocal choir sound seemingly within the sound sources…in some moments the sourced orchestral runs clearly on display, replayed here with high rates of speed ghosting them from their previous reality. after the 30:00 mark the harshness of this piece starts to compound and layer. after a few minutes this begins to settle, partly, with smaller bursts of the layered tearing appearing. though this begins to engorge itself again leading up to the 40 minute mark; harsh screeching layering over 2 or 3 more subtle string layers below. the louder & closer prominences full of a variety of sounds, partly morphed in Kayn’s construction/deconstructions in his studio. a temporary stasis with the feedbacks and painful vessels of attack is found and felt only in the last two minutes of the piece; it leaves the listener feeling unended in some way.
  

• a focus on bursting abnormalities and violences pockmarking the background layers of a space, uncontrolled, opened, and raw.
  

• features close to the source soundscapes used, from a variety of places including some more common, but also bits of electronics and noise.

  • 45:08 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 16

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 10-01, 13. Antarary

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• over halfway through The Ortho-Project series here, Kayn’s gone closer than ever towards horror movie style soundtrack music with Antarary. the stretched and morphed strings are not always on their own, with peak moments in the swelling and falling accompanied by other elements Kayn brought in. this is a moving piece but doesn’t stray far from many other pieces in the series or this era, at least by way of sound source components or approach & execution. the peaks of this one do stand out and help present a dynamic sway not always achieved elsewhere. it contributes to the emotional strength of the piece, the bubbling ice, the sharp clinking from another room, the startling bursts decaying into minutes of comedown. the whole piece seems to lay dying in the last minutes, gurgling in some place between organic & mechanical, until a sharp sudden awakening in the last moments…a truly exemplary piece of Kayn’s output here.
  

• worth nothing here the photo included with The Ortho-Project CD set, shown in part in the video. the stacks & stacks of cassette tape players, with a reel-to-reel in the background, speak a lot to what’s heard at the fore during this time period, and undoubtedly much of the previous material Kayn worked on were using similar techniques. when and exactly how the cassette tapes became such a prominent component isn’t clear yet, though it may be in some of the interviews with and writings about Kayn. the blurring of his hand along with the odd angle of his face in the photo makes him look decidedly alien. these interviews, composition techniques & equipment, & notes about Kayn himself haven’t been too much a part of this daily listening series thus far, but will be at times going forward as the scope expands to include earlier works and more of the tentpole releases, along with the more obscure. this isn’t entirely mapped out yet.
  

• a focus on emotionally terrorizing & mesmerizing slow meditations, punctuated to varying degrees with climactic & piercing accents.
  

• features a number of tense stretched string sections with icy clamoring, vaguely mechanical vocals & clinking sounds, gurgles & bubbles.

  • 53:05 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 15

Roland Kayn - Decares

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• starting with chaotic meshes of tape in a web twisted around the listener, just a couple of minutes in some space and temporary reprieve is given, though it does not last. in here are organs, bells, tense strings, any number of components removed from their source and injected here. dark doors close, tapes spin again. this up and down begins to settle into a slower shifting of tones. about 32-33 minutes in things fade to a near silence, signaling a turn to the final movement in the piece, with drawn out organ sounds layering and reverberating, recordings of splashing in water, feedback of metallic synthesis, slowed crashing sounds, all foreboding and smeared across all around. harsher and more menacing sounds heard early on have returned, full of some former mundane purpose here spun and twisted into a fearful mass of some unexpected fate. strings slowed and changing notes slowly carry us towards the noisy and scraping ending, seemingly returned back to where we started.
  

• a focus on some harsher and more chaotic combinations of sound reflecting of unknown places around us and in front of us at any moment, with some reflection on options taken and not taken.
  

• features sound sources repurposed keeping much of their initial textures and forms, not as morphed as other pieces of Kayn from this time period.

  • 48:13 - released via Bandcamp July 7, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 14

Roland Kayn - Inerziali

• 1965: version for 5 players Donaueschinger Musiktage, composed 1963

• Inerziali (or Inexiale) is an early composition for “5-20 players” with the take performed here being for a wind quintet. the piece itself, despite being the first composition performed by human players directly under interest this year so far, still feels quite like Kayn. it is far shorter than others yet, but still is built upon some radical exploration of an off-kilter idea; here the idea being short jagged phrasings of uncertain direction confidently stumbling ahead in time and space. in sync at moments, disparate at times, often in direct conflict with one another, the sparse intercutting of phrases against regular silences filled with small sounds from the players or the wash of recorded noise all puts this still seemingly in line with Kayn’s later final recordings in some ways. the drawn notes and synced/unsynced playing of the wind instruments feel immediately avant-garde but still quite measured and restrained in some broad sense: this is not a classical approach to a composition, but it’s not yet imbued with the inhuman and surreal that Kayn would be working on in later decades.
  

• a focus on quick expressions of constantly changing moments against silences against moments.
  

• features a string quintet performing the piece of quick short melodic phrases, often at odds with one another, pausing and leaving pregnant silences between.

  • 03:25 - recording via archive.org CD upload of “1960’s Broadcasts of Contemporary Music Vol. 15”
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 13

Roland Kayn - The Art of Sound, 03. Soundways

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• it seems these three pieces are likely using the same source sounds, being treated in their own ways and to their own ends. this third piece feels less overtly organic though does feel quite naturally moving around within its extended runtime. a fade out right about halfway through the piece doesn’t leave for long, fading back in slowly and with a more drawn out approach to the sound manipulation. the slowness here is emphasized with some of the most sour frequencies and combinations heard from Kayn. these thicken and broil in a distance from the listener, the heat & death radiating & filling the air as the piece flows towards its ending. rolls over heavy lands bring volume crests, raise the form closer and closer, still drifting and swaying and pulsing. feedback in higher registers simulates some new unease in a boiling sea of it. the richness culminates in a plateau of seething frequencies flat but in constant roiling movement, some new stasis, that quite abruptly cuts itself off. the ending is so sudden it seems almost certain that Kayn ran out of tape or recording media, whatever that was at the time of these recordings.
  

• a focus on a sea of uncertainty, unease, drifting in and around and out.
  

• features shifting and falling frequencies, stretched & atonal stringlike sounds as found in the previous portions of The Art of Sound pieces.

  • 66:43 - released via Bandcamp February 4, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 12

Roland Kayn - The Art of Sound, 02. Transition

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• Transition starts mid-thought, a metallic & organic essence hovering, stalking. spinning and screeching tape sounds cut in and push the air harder, cut out and leave the space a temporary vacuum. again and again, the squealing Kayn is using often is here at the forefront, and truly the main component of the piece. it lowers itself in register & distance from the listener, getting more confident but less violent, stalking more slowly, but still in some unstoppable hunt or search. patterns within rise and fall, never settling but never straying far from a few places.
  

• a focus on a confrontation & relationship with an unknown, unknowable other.
  

• features repeated tape spins & shifts as the main driver of this piece, with sourcing of sounds seeming to be similar stringlike meditative pieces as heard in Genesis.

  • 24:16 - released via Bandcamp February 4, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 11

Roland Kayn - The Art of Sound, 01. Genesis

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• the first 5 minutes of this feel like a contained piece, a small, almost soft meditation. just the moving frequencies of stringlike tonalities bowed and warping, reverberating through some unreal space. as things come back in after the intro, the volume and aggression are ramping slightly, though restraint is still shown. the piece moves slowly around within this framework, often straying towards the distance & softer, quieter edges, but never slowly fully, and surely never stopping. a calm, growing beast swimming in the deep, cold waters, feeding on the small pieces left around floating in the doldrums, lost by the current to sway directionless, seemingly for eternity, until the tapes’ soft magnetism attracted them. as the last 5 minutes are here we get a hit from some thudding stab, seemingly out of nowhere, triggering some climactic final circling and movement. swelling tones become notes, a small melody appearing before some last deep chord falls and drags the creature down, away, slowly into some unknown depths below.
  

• a focus on a feeling of slow, meditative growth & understanding, of allowing of a simple existence, measured knowledge.
  

• features long passages of just effected atonal stringlike sounds slowly morphing, drifting around and around, some hints at melodies and chords very rarely here.

  • 48:35 - released via Bandcamp February 4, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 10

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 09-01, 12. Anisotropy EE

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• a slow, fearful start to this portion of The Ortho-Project, which doesn’t take but a few short minutes to pull itself into haunting atonal wavering strings. glassy, percussive sounds are heard rustling, shimmering, and are suddenly the harbinger of a deep, booming chord that takes things to an even scarier place. some silence and calm is carried here, into a stillness that slowly allows itself to be lost. Kayn churns here for some time, the unsettling sound moving but never leaving, circling the listener in space and in time. this falls into the Kayn/cybernetic system ripping & tearing spinning tape, with some moments of heavy feedback becoming tonal, drones appearing in the living creature leading up to the penultimate minutes the sounds begin to morph into some terrifying speaking or barking cadences briefly. the lifeform/composition created in the act of performance & recording these pieces really feel not exactly ‘alive,’ but more so that they’re recordings of a lifetime, in some way; perhaps the sessions & recording is the life. the sound is given some essence, some spark, and let develop, evolve, meander, decay. it exists only in the recording, of the recording. this is not meant literally of course, but the impression of this is one of the only ways to explain or understand this music of Kayn’s during this time period, perhaps all of his cybernetic works. there’s some world created, or some lifeform, or some unknown object, born from the conditions Kayn’s set forth.
  

• a focus on a slow and measured growing body, learning to exist in its skin.
  

• features deep basses, churning string loops, tearing tapespins, tonal delay feedback.

  • 61:14 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 09

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 08-02, 11. Conversions

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• almost a false start the first minute of this seems to shift over to another register, then take off with first hisses, then organic knocking, a bursting of mechanic gurgling. echoes of a string section playing a descending melody briefly heard in the undercurrent. shifting tones again lead to a reformed view, or sight. more orchestral echoes are allowed to appear by Kayn, like an organism gestating under some translucent eggsac. moments of underwater sounds are here and there, questioning the placement and progeny of this all. slow writhing for minutes turns into a tonal dropping, background reverberations endlessly around it all. repeating swells into near-distortion with ratcheting cuts feel modern but also rather analog. the construction of these is seemingly without edits or adjustments, but moments like these seem odd with that in mind…though not impossible, of course. the complex design of the specific cybernetic setup used per pieces/pieces/studio/year/etc. isn’t exactly documented it seems. the output is often quite telling for the dissection, but straying too close to those academic/equipment detailing isn’t likely any time soon in these daily listenings. this piece ends with a harshness & helplessness, having exhausted itself again and again.
  

• a focus on swelling dark pieces, crashing rises, subtle leavings.
  

• features noisy swells & distorted tones, moments of small orchestral seeds.

  31:46 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024

  • listening notes recorded on February 08

Roland Kayn - Dispersions

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• orchestral swells ran through the machine, with softer approaches & endings, though there’s some raucousness to this all. skittering noise & skips, starts, fits, shifts. until almost the 20 minute mark these seem similar each time, in their own ways, though the swelling slowly intensified in a few ways over that time. after the slight pause the listener is greeted with more layered versions of these same ideas, which shifts our focus constantly & adds heavily to the tension. the cacophony is doubled, a siren is even heard some minutes into this section. overall things do slow in pace again as this movement continues, but the last ten minutes beginning with an extended feedback sound start the final movement. glass breaking, tapes spinning, doubled and layered, starting and stopping, culminates in cacophony again. the last minute of the piece fades softly.
  

• a focus on swelling again and again, layering and releasing, harsh stops and cuts, loud moments punctuating.
  

• features swelling orchestral chords made for softness reformed into every emotional possibility.

  • 47:25 - released via Bandcamp February 6, 2025
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 07

Roland Kayn - Sorales II

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• seemingly continuing where Sorales I left off, we have a softer & somewhat calmer piece in Sorales II. a strong pushing and pulling of the familiar string sounds from Sorales I carries us through here through much of II. this first half is very Kayn, and largely pleasant. the strings and some sound sources carry us into a central pad sound, a glassy lakebed within the larger place, closer to some past. from here we extend with more determination and drama until the slow fading minutes at the end.
  

• a focus on a three act composition, the space within these landscapes created.
  

• features a few original sound sources peeking through, a number of string sounds, a section of a glassy synthesizer pad landscape.

  • 33:42 - released via Bandcamp August 4, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 06

Roland Kayn - Sorales I

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• the piece begins in the middle of an expression. within a couple of short minutes there’s melodic percussives with voices singing along, falling slowly into unsettling decay, nearby bells, & winds. the piece dances away from us in slow string sustains & swells, becoming softer, quieter, younger, less known. the piece explores this time but returns slowly, changed, gurgling, less & less what we saw at its first face, a deeper, older beast. it circles & it paces, dragging the sky around it, dragging its past skin from its limbs.
  

• a focus on a birth in media res, a growth and a long maturation away, distant, quiet, only to return larger, stronger, aged, unafraid.
  

• features a strong in media res startup and early exploration of source sounds, blurring with layers of string sounds pulling the piece forward into noise and gurgling tapes by the end

  • 33:00 - released via Bandcamp August 4, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 05

Roland Kayn - Zone Senza Silenzio

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• swelling hissing tape spins & discordant swirls are the dominant sounds here, but this piece is hiding a lot of connections to its past within it. dark, slowed orchestras appear at times, distant winds rush towards the listener, only small moments of pause let some orientation be arrived at, tho this is attached in no time. clinking synthesis, percussive smatterings, anything and everything finds itself here and moves the listener around it. moments of songforms spring up out of nowhere, only to disappear in another outburst with no direction but motion. the second half of the pieces slows the pace but doesn’t stop, save for a few short moments. the holds are held longer, the spins may stop, start up, spin down, but the source sounds here are more prominent & unmasked. the depths of this are explored, the heights are viewed but muddled, fogged over. many sounds have carried but the creature has grown, it has become something anew. a rhythm is fallen into right at the end, a way to step forward found. quite a strong piece.
  

• a focus on a single creation testing, growing, moving, exploring the world, its past bubbling up to show under its skin often.
  

• features a number of strings/orchestral pieces, glassy clinks & percussion, metallic resonances of varying sources & results.

  • 55:25 - released via Bandcamp June 18, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 04

Roland Kayn - Reflets du Spectral

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• reformed pieces from Spectral it seems…some source sounds bleed through into the finished piece, voices, orchestrations…it all gets blurred and jagged and broken, twisted, reformed. it ends up more modern in vibe and execution than the other Spectral pieces (covered in January). interesting in this aspect for certain, and perhaps for the slower pace with cuts it’s trying for. it drifts away in the last quarter, unsure of why it was reassessed, uncertain of where to go, what to do, what to be.
  

• a focus on slower paced reflections on past experiences, cut & regrown from the shards & slices of before.
  

• features small portions of recognizable voices, orchestration at a slower pace.

  • 26:28 - released via Bandcamp May 7, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 03

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 08-01, 10. Ataraly

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• ringing bowls, spinning cylindrical ships, pinging search beacons. extended softness & hesitance between swells & zooms, these spaces are often where Kayn’s hidden small bits of the world outside bleeding into this other place created & existing only of sound. small rustlings, crackling material forms, sublimating fogs, any and every little bit of imagined or real soundscape is spun up and flung outward against the stereo field. the last minutes are a crashing cacophony with small decaying after…an ending filled with what seems like new sounds, new places, but truly could just be amplified & crazed aspects from earlier. the inability to truly trace the sound sources is an inescapable break in the maze…in nearly any music in history the genesis of the sounds heard by the listener, be it live or in recordings, is by and large able to be determined, if one so chooses to dissect. some genres and styles and approaches drift further away from this, of course, with electronic, noise, and so forth being the most prone for a loss of sound sourcing, but Kayn’s work pulls from far deeper & more unknown wells than nearly any others. the disconnection from reality this imparts is no doubt clear in the listening notes so far this year.
  

• a focus on deep uncertain places within.
  

• features slow rich swells, small pieces of the world spun and twisted with a strong climax in the last minutes of the piece.

  • 40:32 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 02

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 07-01, 9. Kthoor

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• triggered & re-triggered spinning & hissing, again & again, with subtle or drastic variations to each, no simple pattern but again a general pattern of movement & swelling heard in earlier The Ortho-Project pieces. a long silence about 24:30 into the piece resets the jagged flow of repetition, as we move to some new place within. more mechanical sounds, more organic sounds, perhaps the spun tape sound blurring them is more reduced at moments? the result is quick visitations & glimpses of pasts, of alternate worlds, views through others’ eyes. the decay into some moments longer, small times to see somewhere else, something foreign, does begin to degrade the sense of center and of self, the composition becomes not a piece of music but a filter for experiencing the world outside of the sounds.
  

• a focus on repeated view swapping, on leaving the self & entering the other places shown.
  

• features swells and re-triggering of sounds & tape pieces, snippets of other places.

  • 44:04 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on February 01

Roland Kayn - La Ranar

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• impossible instruments performed by inhuman hands in impossible rooms, solo performances. Kayn almost seems to be trying to recreate the experience of being in a small place, a small room, perhaps an improvised piece, perhaps not but some arrangement designed by a composer to sound as this? the reality of Kayn crafting these is itself a bit of a parallel…seemingly most or all of this era of Kayn’s output was crafted from older material he had recordings from, repurposed, reused, recycled, & reformed. plans on speaking more on these aspects & thoughts next month.
  

• a focus on what seems a recreation of a small intimate place, a performer or performers, center stage
  

• features what sounds like performances of alien instruments, with occasional subtle/occasional cacophonous accompaniment.

  • 47:03 - released via Bandcamp December 1, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 31

Roland Kayn - Sound-Hydra, 04. Sound-Hydra Part 4

• 2001 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• crushing rhythmics attack over and over, with spaces & complements by way of hissing, staccato nightmare hits, softly deployed moments of pause harkening back in ways to the previous Sound-Hydra parts. unsettling small stretches of wavering frequencies. all re-churned again and again, brief pauses breaking the spell for sudden quiet moments. the mechanical & digital aspects of Part 4’s dramatic twists and turns, contrasted with the first 3’s more expected Kayn approach, is interesting in and of itself. Part 4 stands in a unique place on its own but feels less moving than much of the previous Parts. the implied narrative of arrangement here, along with the changing compositional types & sound pallet, makes for a particularly intriguing look backward, as these pieces from 2001 are some of the earliest Kayn explored thus far; the colors of a more historically-based composition are more obvious, though not to any detriment, but it’s worth noting at this stage of the journey.
  

• a focus on pressing attacks & seething, dense harshness & oppression.
  

• features crunching percussive industrial styles of rhythms & repetition.

  • 23:06 - released via Bandcamp October 4, 2020
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 30

Roland Kayn - Sound-Hydra, 03. Sound-Hydra Part 3

• 2001 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• drowning, drifting downward in the open water, still conscious after lungs are filled with water. the water’s depths are endless, the drowning is a permanence, a stasis. voices begin to bubble from within the water, or the mind. rhythms churn. voices stretch & the world itself follows. voices of a new plane appear & corrupt, deep & dark bass tones pummel, while high tense strings of the Sound-Hydra smear the experience into a horrifying blur at each moment. the glass or mirror between the worlds shatters, Kayn’s broken through somehow. the water carries on through, the creature swims through. an overflow, a waterfall, a sudden quick emptiness, another transition. a deeper realm, the voices are not present, not within, but overtaking entirely. noise and deep bass return briefly to close out part 3 with all it’s seeming depth and death.
  

• a focus on a sinking, a drowning, as a transition to other states or places or environs, dipping in over and over, deeper and deeper.
  

• features high-pitched strings heard with the other Sound-Hydras, more distorted vocals, some moment of deep synthesized bass tones, uncommon in Kayn’s works explored thus far.

  • 41:13 - released via Bandcamp October 4, 2020
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 29

Roland Kayn - Sound-Hydra, 02. Sound-Hydra Part 2

• 2001 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• ups and downs, in volume and pitch, in openness and calmness. this piece is somehow truly calmer than the previous, yet still holds tension in its composition. frequencies drift up, around, let in the bells and the chimes, harsher tape switching, a stretching of tones as Kayn’s often doing. the space hovers above the listener, slowly revealing aspects of itself, maybe a mirror for some.
  

• a focus on a slow-moving, shimmering presence of some larger or unknown aspect of self.
  

• features high pitched drifing and moving stringlike sounds, similar to Part 1

  • 44:01 - released via Bandcamp October 4, 2020
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 28

Roland Kayn - Sound-Hydra, 01. Sound-Hydra Part 1

• 2001 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a spigot is opened and noise pours forth. digital, musical, incomprehensible, who’s to say but the listener’s ear or whim. the noise nonetheless does continue to flood out in small bursts. an ethereal but unwelcoming layering of tones drone and slowly move, becoming some glassy immensity all around. piercing moments fade and show a digitized orchestral resonance beneath. the present fades, with some past or some future filling in the space suddenly. Kayn’s begun to delve deep into his history at this time around the turn of the century, so surely this is some reconstructed pasts he’s reassembling, reviewing, reabsorbing, recontextualizing. tapes spin and warp at times, the sounds moving higher & higher it seems, ever so slowly feeding itself away from the depths, trying to hover above the water’s surface, to spread itself and to grow in parallel or as a mirror. unbroken but not endless. clear but imperfect. a mirror that allows an unknown light to shimmer through. Kayn’s Sound-Hydra begins very strong, and quite unique.
  

• a focus on an ever-moving surface reflecting, refracting.
  

• features padlike strings & harmonic resonances filtered, drifting, moments of unnatural tape spin & atonal descent.

  • 21:53 - released via Bandcamp October 4, 2020
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 27

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 06-02, 8. Perikarya

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• disembodied voices, the sounds of dark winds, screeching machinery, silences (multiple), brief moments of calm sanity. a tumultuous piece of The Ortho-Project. it may be worth reminding at this point that The Ortho-Project seems to be entirely constructed out of previous pieces that Kayn had worked on or created, it seems. how this creation ties into Kayn’s larger way of working or creating; what Kayn was trying to express or allow to be expressed is still elusive.
  

• a focus on a brighter, wider experience and world.
  

• features a wide variety of sound sources

  • 35:35 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 26

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 6-01, 7. Les Rantoles

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• a machine spinning up, spinning down. testing its limits. recharging, discharging, growing lungs. the organic nature of this piece is undeniable. it shapes itself, is deformed by the space it finds itself in, pushes against this & redetermines itself again. huge by the end of the piece, growling, scraping its tongue against its teeth, it turns & gnashes slowly, methodically. this was a strong piece, it might be one of the standouts of The Ortho-Project so far.
  

• a focus on growth in slow measures, large leaps; an ill-defined self leads to an ill-defined reality.
  

• features mechanical growths, hisses, churning joints & deep growls.

  • 43:37 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 25

Roland Kayn - Cybernet AS & TLS, 02. Cybernet TLS

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a tense, haunting reprieve from the changing landscape of the previous track, Cybernet AS. this piece really does stay close to a main idea of slow-moving synth, the first ten minutes so much so that it feels almost meditative. Kayn lets the moment become more dynamic afterwards, still keeping things in a lane. swells start to dominate, sparking pitch whines appear, the stringlike modulations resembling vocal traits briefly again and again. the throat of the machine is an instrument being bowed, or slowly cut; it’s impossible to tell. eventually a lower register sound enters and brings up the sounds of some ancient aural aspect, then fades, then reappears, then fades. it’s gone, and has taken away all with it, back to the time from which it came, perhaps. a lovely piece of music.
  

• a focus on immersion in a moment and that moment’s connection to some other place or time.
  

• features slow tense stringlike sounds held, repeated in meditation or conjuration.

  • 22:55 - released via Bandcamp September 29, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 24

Roland Kayn - Cybernet AS & TLS, 01. Cybernet AS

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• an almost modern-ambient style opening turns into a twisting, striking startle of ideas, swelling synthesis & strings, crashing effects, & Kayn’s most clearly worn tape warps. almost playfully dark melodic dancing carrying the listener along, with a simple but effective layering of contrasting layers creating a rich treat for the ears. an extended watery recreation smashing into disembodied vocal manipulations, heavy phased noises & irregular patterns, jagged percussive startles & scrapes. near-silence is arrived at as we enter the last quarter of the piece, with a marked shift in tone of chanting in the distance, deep frequencies, dark twisted mechanical manipulation…a truly haunting few moments here, Kayn closer to ‘standard’ musical approaches and pallets in this piece, it’s more immediately arresting on a first listen. a climactic ending leaves the listener in a soft wash of a phasing noise.
  

• a focus on a range of emotions & shifting between them regularly to strong effect.
  

• features a changing pallet and range of ideas expressed within its relatively short runtime.

  • 16:39 - released via Bandcamp September 29, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 23

Roland Kayn - An Algorithm MA 71

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• reversing the sounds & the tonality somehow, the piece starts in tension but a strong, sure & sustained tension. it falters, Kayn’s tape is heard briefly, but the tension doesn’t waver, even as the volume falls, meanders. it slowly fades over many minutes, until all that’s left is low frequency slow pulsing. new sounds are born in this empty depth, some briefly heard, others appear and linger, dance, and are forgotten. looping pieces of sound stray from what Kayn often employs, but it’s done to strong effect here. small bits crafted, expanded. the repetition of this and other patterns feeds into the algorithm of the title, it seems. a unique idea compared to many of Kayn’s other works.
  

• a focus on rhythmic repetitions and tensions, examination of the external.
  

• features a variety of sounds in the pallet, sustained tension, reversed samples deep droning bass frequencies, looping bits and pieces.

  • 25:15 - released via Bandcamp December 3, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 22

Roland Kayn - Actual Basic Elements

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• the bulk of the pallet Kayn’s using here has definitely been heard before the last 20 days of listening. without setting things up in a timeline there’s no certainty to the exacts of which came first, not that it matters, but for trying to study Kayn’s works it could be academically interesting. further, the initial state of recordings found from this era of the 2000s seems to have been largely inexactly sorted from what information about this is available. to the piece itself, this one is employing regular use of twisted voices, sped & blurred, quick rushing volume swells that often drop quite suddenly. mechanic tones are held, extended, suggesting something akin to an aging mid-1900s hospital. the directions pointed at by the titles aren’t often too revealing, but Actual Basic Elements seems to referencing something or another…unclear what this might be. a snippet of text from an article or book long forgotten? a small silence as the piece nears its end slowly emerges again, this time allowing its past to show through: snippets of a band are clearly heard, then bits of what could be radio talk, as the everpresent noise elements still hiss and rise. this leads to a sharp sudden ending, nearer to a surface of our more standard world than has been touched in other pieces so far.
  

• a focus on a few elements used to create this near hospital-like soundscape.
  

• features dulled mechanical tones, hissing noise, regularly garbled vocals. briefly some elements of a full standard song are heard, voices can be clearly heard speaking very briefly.

  • 32:46 - released via Bandcamp April 7, 2023
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 21

Roland Kayn - Break Rotations

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• hissing, low dark distant rumbles, skittering sped voices, all are common in this era of Kayn’s works it seems. the endless ways they’re combined & twisted fall into some regular rhythms & patterns, but are nonetheless rich and effective. a climax around 18+ minutes in falls into a small movement reset at around 20 minutes in. these moments/movements have become quite important at contextualizing the shape of the piece as a whole, & are seemingly a remnant of more standard music composition. extended sections of shuffling noises, high pitched digital layers, all of it suddenly undergoes a shift ~33:30, the tape slows down, the tones lower, Kayn leaves the moment hovering above the field, slowly moving in space, ominous but unintentionally. the sounds simply exist to be as they are and Kayn’s letting them float unrestrained by convention, pattern, logic. about 36:30 there’s another extended silence, a reset. perhaps entering the coda of the piece? more minimal here, somehow, but still moving, shifting, speeding. the sharper moments here are more pronounced than anywhere else in the preceding minutes. voices, far-off horns, a bubbling, inhuman laughter. tones held and thrown down, all discarded.
  

• a focus on movement through the and perhaps past the standards of musical composition.
  

• features midrange noises, high pitched noises, high speed vocals & echoing vocals, shuffling noises, digital washes

  • 44:58 - released via Bandcamp October 4, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 20

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 05-01, 6. Synergy

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• high pitched quiet slow pulsing with hanging chords below open up Synergy. Kayn serves variations on this idea, often slamming them shut with a tape surge, to then hear masking and removal of sounds briefly, shifting expectations. distant chords swell into rushing noise, deep low rumbles permeating beneath, sometimes rising into a wind. we get this rising then falling away, then an extended pensive, scraping section. a reset to a deeper haunting world happens though, with new energy. this doesn’t last but a few minutes as the quiet decays towards silence, closer than Kayn usually gets to absolute emptiness. this in and of itself raises tension, surprisingly. and with good reason as wretched scraping enters and overtakes much of the soundscape from here on. the low hanging chords are still around, twisting into speeding tapes again and again. scraping and falling, climbing up a hill, a mountain, falling back a bit, trudging onward. another extended silent section is left to sit for moments and moments more. softer yet still surging warped & stretched low textures briefly overtake, high pitched song fragments warped slow, echoing above the landscape. a final few minutes of rush, with tension ramped up, conclude in a strong, dark finish to this piece. synergy as a word is tainted with connotations of corporate-speak these days, but the concept itself is about connection. even with that in mind, the connections here are heard in one sense, the disparate sound styles here working in conjunction, but a deeper connection doesn’t feel achieved, save for perhaps in the extended silent sections. maybe there’s some connection made when the silence is all there is between aspects.
  

• a focus on joined rising, falling, and resting.
  

• features low rumbling stretched string sounds, dulled high-pitched dissonances, tape spinups, and extended silences between movements.

  • 46:53 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 19

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 04-01, 5. Skips

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• multiple washes of noise connect to one another & fall into the next, are forgotten, then reappear later, further removed from their original source. hints of some long lost recording are heard lapping at the edges of the river of tape flowing past, now twisting & screeching, careening over an of a cliff and turning into a mist of reverb. these familiar approaches from Kayn are nonetheless powerful here. rising again and leading into small quiet sections eventually culminates in a stellar extended quiet section around 30 minutes into the piece that really brings the whole thing into a unique place.
  

• a focus on small vignettes half-remembered, with a rumination on the forgotten lost pieces.
  

• features scraping oscillations, haunting strings, hisses, dark chamber reverbs

  • 47:42 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 18

Roland Kayn - Spectral, Track 3

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a dark descending phrase opens the third piece of Spectral with unexpected normalcy. a few minutes of this seemingly standard approach, with jagged tape cuts keeping the listener uncertain, ramps up the horror movie soundtrack vibes. this quickly descends into Kayn’s style, with stretching and twisting of these sounds into new phases, new phrases, new places. moments of previous Spectral sections seemingly reappear. haunting passages are born of and become small remembered bits of the past minutes & past sections. sharp cuts, small melodic flourishes, & distorted twitches all appear intermittently, but none of these are surprising from Kayn; the moments of near-sweetness as the stringed sounds catch more conventional notes and relationships to one another. scenes change, shifting, drifting, darkening revealing an emptyness, a self.
  

• a focus on a memorable haunting echo re-experienced again & again.
  

• features melodic phrases and significant repurposing of sounds

  • 54:38 - released via Bandcamp April 2, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 17

Roland Kayn - Spectral, Track 2

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• again the first moments feature a melodic phrase, yet this time it’s undercut by a dark, hollowing noise beneath. tape warps spin up and down, writhe and reveal bits of themselves to the listener who sees only the formless result Kayn’s created from them….yet bits of the sources remain within somehow. the final minutes of this are a chaotic extension of the path lead down, with occasional hints of Spectral, Track 1 within. the last minute is a near death-march - a simple melody, the noises beneath erupting in a slow plodding percussive crowdstomp. a strong & disturbing place to end this section at, but effective.
  

• a focus on chaotic twisting & turning, pushing.
  

• features extended tape warping sounds, small melodic phrases

  • 25:37 - released via Bandcamp April 2, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 16

Roland Kayn - Spectral, Track 1

• 2003 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• the first minutes of this are very nearly composed, orchestrated, in an almost traditional sense. that measured/restrained beginning sets this first portion of the piece up to be apart from many of the other works heard thus far. sounds nonetheless are in Kayn’s hands, and they quickly drift towards tape-warped distant cacophonies, speeding mechanical clangor, and screeching noises. sudden stops are used here to great effect, with small soft steps following at moments. many tones are more musical than expected, but to counter this an extended tape warp scratching section is dropped around 26 minutes in. even with these indulgences, nearly ever minute feels more wrought & considered than some other entire pieces which sometimes feel freeform & open-ended with their design and result. to end this Track 1 of Spectral, the last few minutes has Kayn forcing the sounds into a tunnel of some bastard combination of a reverb & distortion. a simple somber melody is repeated amidst the scraping & decay. a truly haunting & moving piece of music this Track 1 is.
  

• a focus on composed & considered sections flowing musically from one to the next.
  

• features extended warped tape scratching, repeated melodies and more musical composition in terms of arrangement & sounds.

  • 39:14 - released via Bandcamp April 2, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 15

Roland Kayn - Hybriditys

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• at times this feels like its closer to traditional composition techniques, though the instrumentation (if it could ever be called as such) is very certainly Kayn. there’s liberal use of high-speed tape warbling throughout, with a number of bell sounds interspersed (often warped, naturally). the bells possibly suggesting religious ceremonies or reverential targets, though no center of praise or worship is heard throughout. the amount of space Kayn creates is a bit staggering, but perhaps its the way that’s more academically interesting…Kayn’s masterful use of not just reverb but volume & panning really expands the stereofield for the listener. watching a painter take a flat canvas & expand it to some distant infinity within with a few lines or brushstrokes is an obvious analog, but considering this might be of help in understanding, which is ultimately the goal of these writings. this piece was captured with a lot of restraint & technique but didn’t immediately stand out on first listen here.
  

• a focus on some deep reverential aspect of approach
  

• features regularly used warped tape sounds, bells, & slightly more musical composition in terms of arrangement of the sound pallet

  • 38:11 - released via Bandcamp January 5, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 14

Roland Kayn - Configurations

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• the density & distance of these sounds and ideas are on full display here. small moments of crescendo again & again, quick endings, slow starts, a mix of a puzzle & a randomized deluge. this one maybe feels the most like one would expect when reading what’s often written about Kayn’s approach & technique of this era: his repurposing of hours of recordings & sources into new creations, self-sampling. the variety of sounds here is seemingly as diverse as any of his heard so far, & notably many are not terribly corrupted beyond recognition…though all have been touched in some way or another for sure, and the brevity of nearly all recognizable bits is a large part of the technique used here in spades. the low churning connective tissue often ties one to the next, but not always. there are many, many significant separations of one thought to the next, playing heavily into a start-stop rhythm he’s using quite often in the selections so far. the ending leaves an emptiness…the world around, now that the music is over, seemingly the next phrase in the piece.
  

• a focus on start/stop jagged pieces, puzzled together with a disregard for a future or a past
  

• features quiet but dense warping tape bits, grain & grit of radios

  • 50:10 - released via Bandcamp December 6, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 13

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 03-01, 4. Tirals

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• seemingly violent & certainly unnerving. Kayn is playing on expected response with dull harsh noises, atonal frequency twisting, & even jump scares. ancient memories & prehuman fears are targeted & reborn in tape warbles & haunting strings. long slower paces, not less active but less changing, are settled upon, volume & mood somewhat tamed. sudden appearances of soft metallic screams. all previous is being remembered more distant now. the immediacy is dulled each time but the remembrance of what was is held inside, the sounds replayed. fear & its causes leave impressions on the mind.
  

• a focus on near-violence of approach, a playing on unnamed fears
  

• features rising tense strings, rare quick stings & mechanical screams

  • 47:22 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 12

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 02-01, 3. Dat SR z

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• piercing sounds, even the slower ones. a rich & slow-pulsing arrangement & design. brief windows of space occasionally resetting the flow. growing in harshness, with small unexpected appearances of musical snippets & small sound pieces populating the silences. about 30 minutes in an extended near-silence changes the shape of the piece as a whole, forcing the listener to pick apart these small sounds captured/created, to explore something quite different for a few short minutes, before a reset turns things around and outward, finishing strongly.
  

• a focus on approach & exploitation of a singular idea formed into a strong & engaging piece
  

• features harsh, sharp, piercing tiny movements, some distortion that may or may not have been intentional, a result of the more aggressive sounds/approach perhaps?

  • 46:55 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 11

Roland Kayn - Impactions

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• brief shot of noise with a seemingly tonal, musical small progression, which fades into the sounds around it. low frequencies rise & permeate, rolling clamor appears & reappears, small detuned orchestras haunt suddenly, briefly. sounds that were voices are heard. a return of the first moments. whistles, music, clanging, much if not all quite distant, moments of musical snippets still dropping in. the feeling of a place & time misremembered, misunderstood, incorrectly created, reality simplistically replicated. knowingly, purposefully unrealistic. 2/3rds in it feels like a new place, a new movement. reversed voices sounds & music all rushing in that slow reverse rush, a sound trying to meet its creation. perfectly beautiful small musical phrases softly heard, perhaps related to the first? briefly again, a low unknown swells. the reverses never leave.
  

• a focus on a small pool of sounds in smaller space, retreading a past, a world gone.
  

• features small melodic string snippets, sped voices & varying clamors.

  • 44:17 - released via Bandcamp January 5, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 10

Roland Kayn - Atix

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• sparks of sound start off the first few minutes, but a low stasis is arrived at after some time. bell-like percussions reappear over & over. melodic phrases captured briefly, small windows to another world that lives outside of Kayn’s mind. musical snippets, field recordings, any number of sound sources are thrown in & arranged into an uncentered mass. aren’t all brains a bit like that? in the shallows of some unknown body, steps heard in the water. tapes spin down to restart the scene.
  

• a focus on memories of moments, of worlds.
  

• features sound collage type cribbing of sources, manipulated

  • 31:45 - released via Bandcamp June 2, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 09

Roland Kayn - Matego II

• 2010 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a slowing approach, a more experienced creation. swelling music in chorus with the screeching, an almost operatic climax. soft chords, offkey but one of the most traditionally musical moments heard from Kayn thus far, just a few seconds long. the conception of these works as coming from a singular person is a bit jarring in ways…though there’s throughline between many sounds & approaches & final works, it’s the ‘person’ part that which is jarring: these so often feel quite alien, quite removed from the normal portrayal of human experience & expression. this is obviously a key component of what makes Kayn’s works a figure worth studying.
  

• a focus on a more mature/dramatic exploration of Matego 1’s sounds, with additions & evolution.
  

• features screeching sounds, with added near symphonic style & pattern.

  • 28:58 - release via Bandcamp January 5, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 08

Roland Kayn - Matego I

• 2010 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• an unopened chasm it seems, emptiness never experienced. digital or tape screeches often resembling vocal cadences & shape appear over and over in the new darkness. space is given to nearly each, but they grow in length and design, unsettling at every new screeching. rises and falls, crescendos in the last minutes, a simple idea taken to its conclusion. this is the latest in Kayn’s life heard so far, it seems he was working on refinement & focus more so than exploration here.
  

• a focus on a simple idea performed & shaped masterfully.
  

• features screeching sounds punctuating near silences.

  • 23:59 - release via Bandcamp January 5, 2021
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 07

Roland Kayn - Cyber Panoramical Music

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• fullness within a distant quiet, with the sounds of life. a whistle, clanging of movement. again, cinematic in many ways. small sounds populate, large sounds arrive. the restraint & emptiness on display is surprising for long stretches. a seeming pause or slow change to a new movement about 34:00 feels like a reset, dark wavering voice of an other taking center briefly. there’s such patience here within the panorama, the landscape within the machine perhaps? or viewed by one? created with one (some), literally, is the more basic & easy interpretation, & most obviously correct. toned percussive instruments appear, bell-like & soft, almost sweet, then are followed by violins, a sense of a humanity. stopped by tape. humanity reappearing, changed, changing. the last minutes feel like an arrival to a new place, or maybe the place itself shifted around or in? a newness.
  

• a focus on an exploration of a landscape, a space around. within?
  

• features constant quietness, brief rememberences of humanity that have been partly lost, unrespected, unknowable.

  • 01:06:40 - released via Bandcamp October 6, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 06

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 01-02, 2. Itirsis

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• tiny speckle of a noise is heard & disappears, slowly reappearing again & again in differing stretched & swayed forms. the sounds crescendo & slip from side to side, with no discernable path at any moment. all grows & falls though, all pushes inward farther into itself as well. less defined than the preceding Atharyt but perhaps connected? the work is moving but in a way that seems to be hidden on first listens (having heard this twice now).
  

• a focus on quiet inner self, disconnection.
  

• features soundwashes similar to Atharyt but perhaps entirely unrelated? many of these works were referencing the same years of sound pallets so without detailed analysis it’s hard to nail this down.

  • 27:34 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 05

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project, 01-01, 1. Atharyt

• 2007 recording: Reiger Recording Studio

• hissing noise that becomes ever more to be structured like human screams. steam fills the spaces between, with what feel like rudimentary horns occasionally within the space catching air. hints of an unrealized choir are heard, then sounds of a machine trying to imitate a small rabid animal. near-percussive patterns emerge, the hissing reinvigorated. a new distance is realized. a sudden soft presence is heard in the midst of this. a new thickness is slowly flooding in with this, & the feeling of conflict permeates the next minutes. rising violence, ending in digital decay & unsettled placement. absolutely stellar last 8 minutes or so.
  

• a focus on hissing noises resembling animals/humans.
  

• features noisy sections with large sections of low volume atonal sounds between, distant, often confined partly to one side of the stereo field, with reverb washes carrying the span between.

  • 47:50 - CD set released via frozen reeds August 30, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 04

Roland Kayn - Canthara

• 2006 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• it might be too simple to call this horror movie soundtrack, but that’s the first touchpoint felt. there’s much more to it of course, this is a sheen of the surface of an ocean slowly churning in a bay, soft lifeless light of it. this feels everchanging, yet ends almost having risen above itself in some sense.
  

• a focus on slowly changing swells, waves.
  

• features atonal frequencies constantly morphing & swaying.

  • 49:20 - released via Bandcamp January 3, 2025
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 03

Roland Kayn - Sonority ERT

• 2004 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a quick start of a sheering, the essence that pervades the heart of the work. this softens immensely, nearing a silence but never allowing it throughout the piece’s stretch. a cinematic first half of the work, drama & intensity constantly building, releasing, like cavernous rusting lungs. sped sounds interject suddently but never harshly. rises of blurry clamors loop unsequenced. dulling to near silence again & again, atonal essence centering to the very last sharp minutes.
  

• a focus on build & release & near-silences.
  

• features blurry atonal pads & cinematic intensity.

  • 38:42 - released via Bandcamp November 3, 2022
    
  • listening notes recorded on January 02

Roland Kayn - TLS

• 2005 Realisation: Reiger Recording Studio, Nieuwe Pekela

• a near empty expanse punctuated by growths. some growths contain insights into other soundplaces. slow shifting from a near ease to strong tension, then elsewhere. sounds are scraping against the edges of one another, opening flaws. the title could be a reference to TLS termination proxy. the vocal-ish aspects of sounds might be simulating communication over digital networks using TLS encryption, perhaps? these aspects suggested by @thisisnotparakovsky@convo.casa via socials, credit to him & thanks to his insight here.
  

• a focus on reception or dispersement in some sense.
  

• features uneasy pads, portions of more standard band recordings, occasional heavily sped-up vocals

  • 44:03 - released via Bandcamp April 5, 2024
    
  • listening notes recorded January 01

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