Roland Kayn - simultan - 24-bit (Avant Garde Project 164)

The Avant Garde Project is a series of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic torrents digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. This is wild stuff, so check it out if you've never heard this sort of music before. The analog rig used to extract the sound from the grooves is near state-of-the-art, producing almost none of the tracking distortion or surface noise normally associated with LPs.

AGP1-157 are now available for direct download in the archive at www.avantgardeproject.org

AGP158-163 and other AGP installments are also available at http://thepiratebay.org/user/loudav

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AGP164 comprises a complete 24-bit, 44.1 kHz transcription of a remarkable 3LP collection of electronic music by Roland Kayn, who was born in Germany and has been largely active in the Netherlands. Simultan: Cybernetic Project for 1-5 rooms, is one of his major works of electronic music, composed at the Instituut voor Sonologie, Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht, and the Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives, Brussels. It was performed first in 1974 and released in Germany on what is now an out-of-print and very rare 3LP set on Colosseum Records (COLOS SM 1473).

This work is composed in what I would describe as the Utrecht style of electronic music, with sound elements that explore the boundaries between tone and noise, massed to produce dauntingly complex timbres, and with a strong emphasis on sustained tones (as opposed to the ping-poing sounds more characteristic of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio of that time). I recommend listening to it at a high enough volume to be disquieting (so to speak).

The work is described as being for 1-5 rooms, meaning that the sounds are to be simultaneously projected from multiple rooms in one building. It's not entirely clear from the notes how this is done. The original tapes were available with as many as 16 tracks, so perhaps some tracks were projected in one room and some in another. Having only a stereo version to work with, one could simultaneously play the piece in two or more rooms, starting from a different track in each room. This may be very different from what the composer intended, but it's an intriguing thought. One could for example do this in a series of different offices in a suite, or a series of different rooms in a residence hall.

The LPs transcribed for this installment are in excellent condition, and were provided through the exceptional generosity of an AGP partisan in the Netherlands. Because they contain electronic music of such complexity, I did not do any de-clicking, to avoid possible false positive changes to the data stream. The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the booklet that came with the set, with notes in both German and English.

NOTE: AGP165 will comprise a complete 16-bit, 44.1 kHz transcription of the same set, which can be burned to a pair of audio CDs. I may upload that tomorrow, or I may wait till next Friday.

Roland Kayn’s website: http://www.kayn.nl/

Equipment used for A/D conversion: Lyra Helikon phono cartridge, Linn LP12/Lingo turntable, Linn Ekos SE tonearm, Audioquest LeoPard tonearm cable, PS Audio PS2 preamplifier, Kimber PBJ interconnect, M-Audio Audiophile USB A/D converter.

I – Monostabile [27:48]
II – Sources Ergodiques, part 1 [16:35]
III - Sources Ergodiques, part 2 [16:29]
III – Logatome [29:08]
IV – Matrix [21:47]
V – Invarianten [20:48]

NOTE: To the best of my knowledge, these recordings are not currently available commercially. If you know otherwise, please let me know ASAP, as I do not wish any artists to be deprived of the royalties that they so richly deserve.