Roland Kayn

The Ortho-Project

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Deluxe CD Box Set

Boomkat Product Review:

Roland Kayn is back in a big way on frozen reeds with 12 hours of previously unheard, unfathomably layered, expansive and intrepid electro-acoustic composition that almost tangibly reveals a ghost in the machine - RIYL Jim O’Rourke, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, latter stages of The Caretaker, NWW.

‘The Ortho-Project’ weighs in among Roland Kayn’s heaviest, both in physical weight and the sheer scope of his vision, encompassing vast black holes of sound generated from complex timbral arrangements. The late, great, artist passed in 2011, but his archive keeps on giving like a cracked open puzzlebox unleashing a stream of phantasmic aural apparitions. In key with the release series of his work initiated and maintained by frozen reeds, this one is again faithfully restored and remastered from original tapes by Jim O’Rourke and clad in Robert Beatty’s cryptic cybernetics-inspired artwork to best represent a pinnacle of Kayn’s mountainous catalogue.

Recorded in 2007, this body of work hails to his years spent at home, in the Dutch countryside, after decades between the ‘70s and ‘90s at the inimitably well-stocked studios at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht. Named Reiger Recording Studio, his home recording facility swapped out the banks of vintage kit for a more stripped down set-up with little impact on his uncompromising vision of sound, which has been posthumously issued on the studio’s eponymous label, Reiger Reeks Records, handled by his daughter Ilse. In the years at his home studio, Kayn continued moving ever forward, outward, but also by effectively revisiting his own work, re-processing the results of decades of research to create ever more complex and disorienting diffusions, whilst also weaving in sampled radio broadcasts and the plunderphonic works of others to complicate matters further. The results convey a super potent sense of psychedelia in their persistently amorphous, polymetric intricacies and rug-pulling logic.

We hear slivers of classical music teased into 46 minutes of wraithlike shrieks and dither on ‘Dat SR z’, and what sounds like a Gruppo jam pulled apart by coenobites, overseen by Hitchcock’s sound designer Oskar Sala (Kayn’s one time tutor) in the nightmarish ’Tirais’. We’re reminded of NWW’s hands-off, electro-magnetic approach to the synth spirits found on ’Soliloquy For Lilith’ in the eerily plasmic, relatively restrained shape of ‘Ataraly’, or what could be an orchestra tuning up on Neptune in ’Sonoritys’.

It’s all frankly jaw-dropping stuff that will provide many happy rewinds for those with the space and time to get deep into it.

Deluxe CD Box Set (20)