Roland Kayn - Simultan 3xLP

Label: Die Schachtel

One of the great pioneers of electronic, computer, and instrumental avant-garde music, for the majority of his life, the German composer Roland Kayn remained almost entirely unknown, a founding member of the legendary ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, heralded as a singular genius by a small number of figures like Jim O'Rourke. Though the composer was included within Deutsche Grammophon's seminal Avant-Garde series during the early 1970s, it wasn't until 2017, six years after his death, that the ranks of his fans began to noticeably swell, following the release of his monumental work, A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound by Frozen Reeds. Die Schachtel present a reissue here of Simultan, an overwhelmingly important work in his canon, from 1977, stretching across three LPs. While Roland Kayn might be easily described as a composer of electronic, electro-acoustic, or computer music, the majority of his career was in fact largely dedicated to the revolutionary sculpting of an entirely new territory of sound: cybernetic music, a generative process of composition through programming. Simultan was among the first of the composer's works to emerge from this process. Cybernetic music grew from Kayn's longstanding engagement and fascination with data processing theory. This territory of creativity was the composer's attempt to allow sound to be self-sufficient, stripping away notions of harmony, melody, and rhythm, deploying complex networks of electronic devices. Created during the period in which Kayn was living in the Netherlands and recorded with the assistance of electronic music legends Jaap Vink and Leo Küpper, Simultan is filled with a remarkable sense of humanity and touch. The sounds on Simultan range from seductive ambiences, grinding swells of atonally and pure texture, to buried tone clusters.

"The mystery, the grace, the boundless invention – Kayn's machine music is a vast catalogue of very human wonder." – The Guardian

Remastered from the original analog master tapes. Includes booklet with new liner notes. Includes printed inner sleeves. Standard edition comes in an edition of 400.