Recent years have seen the release and reissue of dozens of hours of Roland Kayn's music, on several labels and in both physical and digital formats. Our interconnected yet chaotically imbued age seems to be the setting in which Kayn has truly found his audience. The scene is now set for one of the most momentous works in his oeuvre to return to the shelves. "Infra".
One of the titanic cybernetic works Kayn originally released on the Colosseum label in the late 70s and early 80s, "Infra" (1978-79) has come to occupy a very special place in the hearts of fans lucky enough to have copies of the original vinyl box sets. Now lovingly remastered from the original archive masters by Kayn devotee Jim O'Rourke, "Infra" has finally found its way to CD for a new generation of admirers to discover.
For the newcomer, it should be mentioned that Kayn's electronic music exists in a category all its own, bearing precious little resemblance to that of any of his composer peers. His work perhaps sits more naturally in today's non-idiomatic landscape of drones, field recordings, and modular synthesis, yet arrives accompanied by a poise and near-epic suggestion of natural phenomena simply found nowhere else. Stretching forwards across four decades to suggest new possibilities even now, "Infra" represents a musical world ripe for rediscovery.
Roland Kayn (1933-2011) was a German composer of electronic music, known for his lengthy works of cybernetic music.
Roland Kayn started composing at an early age. He was just 20 years old when he won first prize at the festival of 20th century music in Karuizawa, Japan. Performances of his composition
Aggregate (1959) resulted in him becoming persona non grata on the concert stage. Shortly after working in electronic studios in Poland, Germany and Italy, he joined the Gruppo Nuova Consonanza and this crucial detour into improvisation with Franco Evangelisti,
Aldo Clementi and Ennio Morricone helped him find his definitive musical direction. Kayn decided to pursue his musical quest through composition with the intention, strange as it may seem, of excluding the composer as much as possible. He concentrated solely on electronic and electro-acoustic music from 1970 onwards.
From an early age, Kayn was influenced by information theorists rather than other composers, and it was as a result of this that he started using the term "cybernetic" when describing his music. Basically, Kayn would design networks of electronic equipment and then develop a system of signals and commands that it could obey and execute. Words like "melody," "harmony," and "rhythm" do not apply to Kayn's music. Music, supposedly, should have every detail defined by the composer. Kayn insisted that his "cybernetic" music should regulate itself, thereby relinquishing the narrative elements and the psycho-emotional details usually associated with the ideas of "authorship" and "work of art." This meant that even he could not predict the eventual composition, which were sound processes without an epicentre, where every sound is equally important. For Kayn, "
Music is sound, which is sufficient in itself." Roland Kayn felt that present day composers should avail themselves of the electronic techniques at their disposal and that electronic music is more than just the result of rapidly expanding technology.
– Frans van Rossum
