Roland Kayn

A pioneer of electronic, computer, and instrumental avant-garde music, for the majority of his life, the German composer Roland Kayn remained one of the great unheralded figures in the landscape of 20th century sound - a founding member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, who delved into singular territories entirely his own. Fortunately, in the last few years, in part due to the release of his monumental work, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, by Frozen Reeds in 2017, and Die Schachtel’s deluxe vinyl reissue of his seminal composition, Simultan, last year, the scope and depth of his efforts have begun to take centre stage in the public mind. Kayn spent most of his career working beyond the normative definitions and parameters of electronic, electro-acoustic, and computer music, endeavouring to contract an entirely new territory of sound which he referred to as Cybernetic Music, a generative process of composition through programming, carefully aligned with a constant relationship between three parameters - the cybernetical, the technical-physical, and the apperceptional. Among the most important of these efforts are Simultan, Makro, Infra, Tektra, and the recently published Scanning.

The ten Electronic Symphonies – written between 1966 and 1996 – represent a journey through a soundscape where phases of the works from this period (to be considered as the past) constantly meet what is contemporary, while also reflecting impulses. In regard to the selection, self-contained “objects trouvés” were given priority as the pieces were being generated in the studio. Their concretion developed in real time from a complex electronically autonomous system. Since the process cannot be traced back at a later date, the documentation on sound storage mediums becomes essential given that the corresponding details cannot be disclosed, thus abdicating traditional authorship. This “music” thereby exceeds the empirical category of commonly known music. It contains something which was so described by composer Franco Evangelisti “… as arriving at something that suddenly can no longer be called music”.

Electronic Symphony I / III consists of two CDs and includes the following pieces:

Disc 1

Electronic Symphony I (1966-96)
Electronic Symphony II (1970-96)
Equivalence Sonore II (1995)

Disc 2

Electronic Symphony III (1971-97)
Equivalence Sonore III (1995)