Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project (15CD Box Set) (2024)

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.

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.