Simultan

Roland Kayn was a German composer and pioneer of cybernetic music, also known as generative music, also known as electronic music that sounds like the machines are creating it for their own entertainment, according to an aesthetic impenetrable to us mere humans. Although Kayn got his start in conventional avant-garde composition, working with a pencil and score paper, he turned his attention to freer forms in the 1960s, co-founding the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza with Ennio Morricone and others. Eventually, he discovered synthesizers, feedback, and tape effects, which would be his primary tools for the rest of his life, until his death in 2011. In a 1977 essay, Kayn explained that in employing his method of linking up multiple electronic sound sources and signal chains and simply letting them run, “The composer is entirely divested of his original function. He can merely decide whether to intervene, guide, and direct, or whether he is prepared to accept what emerges.”

Simultan, a triple LP recorded between 1970 and 1972 and released in 1977, was Kayn’s debut, and his masterpiece. Listening to it, it’s possible to hear previews of everything from Autechre to Merzbow, and while its compositional logic is both inhuman and somewhat implacable, it has an eerie beauty. It’s a symphony of hum, crackle, crunch, and pulse, totally lacking in conventional rhythm and yet throbbing with life. At times, highly distorted human voices can be heard discussing various subjects in multiple overlapping languages, but the best of the six long pieces — “Monostabile,” “Matrix” — sound like an electronic storm overpowering the equipment meant to capture it. In his 1967 book Hell’s Angels, Hunter Thompson wrote admiringly of “man-made machines so powerful and efficient in their own realms that they challenge a man’s ability to control them…” His chosen examples were Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Ferraris and .44 Magnum revolvers, but Kayn’s rooms full of electronic equipment easily fit the description, and Simultan is the sound of machines achieving sentience. (Note: The original 3LP set was designed to be heard on turntables that flip the record for you, and a 2024 CD edition replicates that running order, so to actually hear the work as intended you must play it as follows: “Monostabile,” “Sources Ergodiques (Part 1),” “Sources Ergodiques (Part 2),” “Logatome,” “Matrix,” “Invarianten.”)