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Roland Kayn: “Tanar,” Part 1 (excerpt)
From the album Tektra (1980-1982)
Since the late 1960s, the German-born composer Roland Kayn has been exploring a type of sound art he calls “cybernetic music.” Using the equipment of the “classical” electronic music studio (wave generators, filters, etc.), Kayn sets up sophisticated mechanisms of feedback and regulation to create sonic processes that behave in unpredictable and yet non-random ways.
Kayn studied with the philosopher Max Bense in the 1950s, and his compositional development was strongly imprinted by his mentor’s thoughts on technology and artificial intelligence. In the 50s and 60s, Kayn worked at some of the most prominent electronic music studios in Europe (in Cologne, Munich, and Milan) before settling down at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht around 1970. It was here that he realized what is widely regarded as his magnum opus, the nearly five-hour-long Tektra.
Tektra, like much of Kayn’s music, can be described as “drone-based,” but paradoxically so. It consists of fields of sound instead of isolable notes, but unlike much drone music, it is not concerned with creating the effect of timelessness or stasis. This is music of the most shattering dynamism, but its energy is distended over vast, glacial expanses of time— like Beethoven on Quaaludes. A brief excerpt such as this cannot do the music justice.
Played 61 time(s).
April 27, 2009, 11:45am
