Huuuge Tip! Over the last five years, Reiger Records Reeks - Roland Kayn’s own label, reawakened by his daughter Ilse - has shown an unprecedented dedication to the work and legacy of the late, great German composer, making his canon of music available to new generations of listeners. A pioneer of avant-garde, electronic, computer, and cybernetic music, Kayn’s work has always been infamously difficult to obtain, positioning him as one of the crucial unsung figures in the landscape of 20th Century sound. Now, launching into 2025 with some serious fire, RRR returns with one of their most expansive and ambitious releases to date: an astounding 5CD box set, gathering two of Kayn’s most important bodies of work, “Elektroakustische Projekte” and “Makro I - III” - originally issued by the small German imprint, Colosseum, in 1977 and 1981, respectively, in their first ever reissue. A towering monument of cybernetic music, and easily some of the most important and engrossing experimental music ever laid to tape, the contents of the entire collection have been sourced from the original analog tapes, preserved in the Lydia and Roland Kayn Archive, and meticulously remastered by Jim O’Rourke. Absolutely astounding and impossible to recommend enough!

It’s rare for a composer to be entirely of their moment, while equally feeling completely autonomous from it, but this was the case for the life and work of the German composer Roland Kayn (1933-2011). First a student of composition and organ, at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, between 1952 to 1955, before studying with Boris Blacher and Josef Rufer in Berlin between 1956 to 1958, all indications were that Kayn would quickly become a darling of the concert stage. At the age of 20, he had already won first prize at the festival of 20th Century music in Karuizawa, Japan, but a few short years later, a performance of his composition, “Aggregate” (1959), rendered him persona non grata within his own context, resulting in a drift between electronic studio across Europe, before settling in Italy for a number of years, where, in 1964, he became a a founding member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, alongside Franco Evangelisti, Aldo Clementi and Ennio Morricone, and momentarily shifted his practice toward improvisation.

While Kayn’s membership within Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza was relatively short lived, he does appear on some of the project's most important, early recordings. By 1970, however, his endless forward drive found him relocated to Utrecht, where he worked at the Institute of Sonology. He would remain in the Netherlands for the rest of his life, producing one of the most singular bodies of experimental music ever made.

From 1970 on, Kayn dedicated his energies to 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. Remarkably, Kayn attempted to exclude the composer as much as possible from the production of music, deferring to generative processes enabled by technology; designing networks of electronic equipment and systems of signals and commands, pursuing a music that had no narrative, psychological, or emotional components. For Kayn, “Music is sound, which is sufficient in itself.”

Two of the earliest and most important releases in Kayn’s catalog are “Elektroakustische Projekte” and “Makro I - III” - originally issued by the small German imprint, Colosseum, in 1977 and 1981, respectively, as triple LP box sets. Reiger Records Reeks 5CD box set comprises “Cybernetics I” and “Cybernetics II” (1966-68), “Cybernetics III” (1969) - realised at Studio di Fonologia, RAI Milan, prior to the composer’s relocation to the Netherlands - “Entropy PE 31” (1967-70), “Monades” (1972) “Eon” (1975), and “Makro I, II, III“ (1977), all created at the Instituut voor Sonologie, Utrecht.

Effectively comprising a snapshot of Kayn’s first decade of working within the discipline of Cybernetic Music, these works fall within the composer’s principled attempts to allow sound to be self-sufficient, stripping away notions of harmony, melody and rhythm, deploying complex networks of electronic devices - largely early computers - to follow his instructions, realising their musicality through a system of signals and commands. While rigorously intellectual and rich with challenging ideas, what rises to the surface is the unavoidable humanity of each of this collection’s longform work, his inquiries after the balance between the “resilience and instability of an oscillating system”. Each a carefully calibrated blanket of sound, falling within an undefinable, liminal expanse between shimmering harmonic ambience, and raw droning distance, where even the most subtle shift manages to trigger movements of a monumental scale. Illuminating this further, in an interview with Mark van de Voor, Kayn later described “Makro I, II, III“: “Makro breathes in and breathes out, then it breathes in again before disappearing into the dark”, emphasizing the delicate balance and subtle transitions through which the piece moves over the course of its duration, particularly discernible in this CD edition, for the first time, now lacking the breaks created by flipping the original vinyl edition.

Like whole ecosystems, unfurling, evolving, and revealing themselves in real time - and yet, somehow, instigating a transitory state outside of time within the listener - each of these pioneering works of electronic and cybernetic music - intricate tapestries of sprawling ambience, swirling textures, and haunting treatments of tonality and atonality - further advances our understanding of Roland Kayn as one of the most radical and forward-thinking voices of his generation. Bridging the period that also comprised seminal works / releases “Simultan” (1977), “Infra” (1981), and “Tektra” (1984), Reiger Records Reeks’ “Elektroakustische Projekte & Makro” fills in a long overdue piece of the puzzle of his hugely important early body of recordings, making them available again for the first time in decades. Issued by Reiger Records Reeks as a beautiful produced 5CD box set, sourced from the original analog tapes, preserved in the Lydia and Roland Kayn Archive, and meticulously remastered by Jim O’Rourke, it’s hard to imagine a more exciting reissue appearing in 2025. Truly monumental, immersive, and creatively astounding, it really doesn’t get better than this!