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.

We managed to obtain limited copies of his sought-after CDs released by Reiger Records Reeks between 1995 and 2006. Gärten Der Lüste / Cybernetics II / L'Innominata consists of two CDs and includes two long pieces composed by Kayn in 1999-2000 and one older piece recorded in 1969:

Disc 1

Gärten Der Lüste (1999-2000)
- Abschnitt I
- Abschnitt II
Cybernetics II (1969)

Disc 2

L'Innominata (2000)
- Abschnitt I
- Abschnitt II