Roland Kayn - Cybernet AS & TLS (2022)

Kayn's deep engagement with the field of cybernetics was perhaps the single most important differentiator in his compositional career, providing a clear conceptual break with the explorations of electronic sound taking place contemporaneously in Germany, France, and isolated pockets of activity elsewhere.

His understanding of the plurality of causal and semantic relationships within the sound itself is markedly clear in the two Cybernet pieces of 2003, where he pays explicit homage to that strain of 20th century thinking defined by Norbert Wiener as “the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Once again the listener (or perhaps more appropriately, user) is situated in a unique sonic terrain, where the narrative is intuitively grasped, yet the events and their placement bear no traces of prior definition.