Check out my new promo video! This one about the Grey Heron which in dutch is called Blauwer Reiger, which translates to Blue Heron, but there is no blue in the Grey Heron!! At least it looks grey. But it could be blue, but that could also be a personal interpretation. In Portuguese this is called Garça Real, where then we just call it royal and keep distance from the color discussion. In german, Grauereiher is in sync with the english translation! Have a good one! Keep it graceful and stay sharp!
The deeper a dive taken into the elastic sound worlds conjured by Roland Kayn, the harder the bedrock obviously underpinning his alternately molten and frozen universe is exposed to be. Sorales II, the most recent release in the growing Kayn archive series, beggars description and confounds expectation yet again through a very surprising sort of unification.
Of course, and as always, the music is riddled with disruption. Given its 2005 vintage, that’s no surprise, and there’s plenty of what sounds like tape manipulation, that dizzying pitch shift and wrinkling effect that pervades the Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound. We are treated to the huge and all-encompassing “major chord” at 10:18, or the intriguing, because so rare, rhythmic layers that occur at least twice, the first forward and the second in reverse. They disappear with the rapidity of their genesis. Even the near silences adorning the last several minutes don’t so much disrupt as posit moments of repose in a quiet storm. The non-sequitur at 28:11 isn’t one really, and more on it presently. In those and all other cases in the 33-minute miniature, disruption is not as much of a primary ingredient. Its presence is subservient to another element, a fresh but slowly moving deep-down thing, a unity in diversity of which those New England Transcendentalists would have spoken with a mixture of pride, admiration and Classical allusion.
It seems a shame to evoke the concept of a drone in this particular instance. Yes, seasoned Kaynians will certainly recognize the long sounds that germinate, ebb and flow, often with fundamental disruptions of their own, especially throughout Kayn’s later works. This drone is different. It’s neither Vanessa Rossetto’s looping palimpsests nor Keith Rowe’s hiss, fizz and crackle conglomerations of radio static, interference, room buzz and charcoal, though it sits adjacent to both. Charles Ives would understand. His “Unanswered Question” or “Central Park In the Dark” contain string passagework that exists in similar spaces, even if the harmonic language diverges. Kayn is a Romantic, and the girders of the second Sorales prove it. Triad and elusive counterpoint emerge and merge from the cross-pollinations of tone and color that bunch, breathe, bunch again and writhe in a way that’s nearly human. Mountains and rapids form a landscape of constant motion dotted with reflective pools of moonlit tone throughout the pitch spectrum, including a single icy note approaching the stratosphere and illuminating all below. Everything is slathered in reverb, never distasteful but definite, a foundation of distant calm beneath lopsided cycles in movement. Listen closely as elements surface, half-repeat and sink. Even the disruptions, like the afore-mentioned sudden juxtaposition and the final gesture of the work, grow out of what has just occurred and out of the reverberant atmosphere containing it. It’s all cold, sometimes even windy as pitch blurs into frosty air, but it’s breathtakingly beautiful from beginning to end.