The Ortho-Project (15xCD Box)

Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project

15-CD limited edition boxed set. 
Audio restoration by Jim O’Rourke.
Artwork and design by Robert Beatty.

"The mystery, the grace, the boundless invention – Kayn’s machine music is a vast catalogue of very human wonder." -The Guardian

"Returning to the unreleased oeuvre of the master of cybernetic sound Roland Kayn, frozen reeds hereby unveils a new high watermark for longform electroacoustic composition, unfolding across 15 CDs in a luxurious gold-stamped boxed set.

With Jim O’Rourke applying his signature restorative touch to the audio, and Robert Beatty taking his cryptic cybernetics-inspired artwork several steps beyond the label’s previous Kayn box, ‘The Ortho-Project’ (2007) – in its 14-hour entirety – finally sees a fitting release.

In 1970, Roland Kayn began a decades-long period of research, development and creation at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht. In the mid to late 90s, he retired, relocated to the Dutch countryside, and began to realise new electronic works at Reiger Recording Studio – his modest home facility. “I finally came to the conclusion,” Kayn would later point out, “that I no longer needed studios to construct my own electronic music.”

The working methods Kayn arrived at individually – without the room-filling synthesisers, mixing desks and signal-processing equipment of Sonology at his disposal – saw him turning his own career into a cybernetic process. From the hours of recorded sound amassed in prior decades, he began processing and assembling a mountainous quantity of new music. His works of this period are focused on reabsorbing and recontextualising his life’s work to produce yet another series of utterly alien landscapes.

From his retirement until his death in 2011, Kayn was wildly prolific, leaving an archive of dozens of finished electronic pieces. Earlier source material is often re-sculpted using the technology Kayn had available to hand, while other techniques such as sampling radio broadcasts or the plunderphonic quotation of others’ works occasionally intercede.

No notes accompany any of this music – no word of explanation or expression of intent. Only the works and their titles remain, the latter often simply deepening the mystery. Their durations range from around 20 minutes to almost 18 hours. ‘The Ortho-Project’, presented here in its 14-hour entirety, is among the longest. At this scale, Kayn’s music is perhaps at its most immersive; the listener senses they are being invited to envelope themselves in a rich environment of diverse timbral physicality rather than a programmatic work. This is simply electronic music as you have never experienced it before." - frozen reeds

Tracklisting:

1-1. Atharyt    
1-2. Itirsis    
2-1. Dat SR z    
3-1. Tirals    
4-1. Skips    
5-1. Synergy    
6-1. Les Rantoles    
6-2. Perikarya    
7-1. Kthoor    
8-1. Ataraly    
8-2. Conversions    
9-1. Anisotropy EE    
10-1. Antarary    
11-1. Rantho    
12-1. Sonoritys    
12-2. Antegry    
13-1. Ecardy    
14-1. La Grada    
14-2. Zazorith    
15-1. Arttiraes