Month: December 2017

A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 16, Arasa, by Roland Kayn.

The 16th and final disc of “A Little Milky Way of Sound”. After the abrasive menace of Icursim, Arasa is an interesting contrast. Much of it is very quiet, perhaps the quietest piece of the entire 14 hour composition.

Contemplative and gentle would be the words I used to describe it.

A slow fade out.

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A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 15, Icursim, by Roland Kayn.

13 hours in, and I can’t say I feel any more confident in detecting an organizing principle or finding motifs in, “A Little Milky Way of Sound,” than I was on day one.

There is definitely a sonic palette that Kayn uses and reuses with varying tweaks applied. The shimmering fields of static sound. The streaming, whooshing, noises like pressurized air or water.

It is interesting how the lack of definable or typical “musical sounds” affects your listening. The slightest nearly recognizable sample, whether it is a creaking door or a processed voice, stands out, calling attention to itself.

Of course, it’s always possible, that those sounds are just my mind attempting to make sense of the boiling sonic chaos.

In any case, Icursim is more menacing, than threatening, with louder than usual percussive events at intervals among the other sounds.

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A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 14, Ritaces, by Roland Kayn

Ritaces starts in the neighborhood of the previous haunted Ecerit pieces, then starts to sound like a summing up. Pieces of previous strategies, that would have been allotted significant time, flash by. Familiar sounding events crop up and fade into others. Foghorns bellow, water streams against pitch charged plates, and many doors creak open in quick succession.

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A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 13, Ecerit I, II, and III, by Roland Kayn.

Maybe it is my mood, but the three Ecerit pieces seem to have more dramatic tension than many of the others in A Little Milky Way of Sound. Definitely, horror movie soundtrack worthy material. Something about swelling swoops and tone slides. Enjoyable, if menacing.

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A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 12, Hatho, by Roland Kayn.

Listening to Hatho, it was funny, one of the primary sounds on it, reminded me of my days as a restaurant dish washer.

It sounds like high pressure water spray hitting different dishes and making differently pitched sounds.

Or, you know, that Delta Faucet commercial with Wilco Drummer Glenn Kotche.

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A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 11, Prahoxx, by Roland Kayn.

Prahoxx starts quietly humming, then moves to some of the most relatively raucous and ominous sounding events in this unusual Milky Way.

Jim O’Rourke, the endlessly hyphenated musician and engineer, took on the task of engineering and restoring these works from the DAT tapes they were recorded to. He was a long time fan of Kayn’s, describing some of his more adventurous attempts at electronic composition as “lame attempts at Kayn inspired music.” Mr O’Rourke, describing aspects of the recording, “But this does seem like it was Kayn’s ‘summing up’ of his work. At this point since I am working on it on a very microscopic level instead of a macro level, I am learning a lot about his work just by looking at the waveforms. I always knew phase relationship was a big part of how his pieces worked, but actually looking at it has been kind of eye opening.” 

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