Mutenaces by Roland Kayn

Can electroacoustic music – born of the glitch, the treatment, and the edit – be beautiful? The sheer beauty of the sounds employed in Kayn’s music is too little remarked upon, their luxuriant, occasionally repeated deployment perhaps hinting at how the composer himself might answer that question.

No other body of work continually returns us to the tipping point between futurism and mysterious quasi-nostalgia – disorientation and inexplicable familiarity. The effect is fascinating, and Mutenaces embodies it bountifully.

No sooner than the listener begins to wonder at how a sound could be conceived, but it begins to move. We realise once again that we are not standing entranced before a static image, but an assemblage of pieces in continual motion. An alien architecture unfolding.

"The mystery, the grace, the boundless invention – Kayn’s machine music is a vast catalogue of very human wonder." -The Guardian

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