Kevin Drumm (b. 1970) is a Chicago-based composer of electronic music, and his works have been published by labels like iDEAL, Editions Mego, Erstwhile and lately he has been self publishing many of his recent works. This box set is compiling some of that, paired with some exclusive things aswell as new versions. It is moving from his harsher stuff to more ambient recordings. iDEAL is proud to release this massive 10xCD box set mastered by Lasse Marhaug.
Resynthese FAVN is a ten-CD box set and publication presenting a new realization of Florian Hecker’s 2017 thirteen-channel installation of the same name. First exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien in the exhibition “Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese,” and elaborating upon ideas first presented in the 2016 project FAVN, the ten works that comprise Resynthese FAVN present iterations of a synthetic timbre produced using machine-listening processes of analysis and further resynthesis —the sonification of a machine caught in the act of listening to itself. Accompanying the audio are three booklets containing three new essays offering critical and historical context for the work, developed in collaboration with the British publisher Urbanomic.
FAVN and its resynthesis point back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun,” and its subsequent musical and choreographic interpretations by Claude Debussy and Vaslav Nijinsky. A faun, straddling reverie and reality, recounts a sensuous meeting with several nymphs. It is unclear whether the experience was an illusion; asks the faun, “Did I love a dream?” Hecker, in turn, asks listeners to examine their own sensory perceptions. What forms do our human minds make out of the algorithmic timbres and synthetic voices that unspool across the versions of Resynthese FAVN? Sound drags, ascends, chirps, warps, and growls with manic irregularity. Definite but indescribable differences emerge across the ten 53-minute tracks. Language—occasionally emerging through a synthetic voice, sourced from a libretto written by Robin Mackay—proves unstable within the hallucinatory textures set loose by Hecker’s composition. As chimeric shapes materialize and fade away, one might further ask: are we listening for the faun, or do we become faun through listening? Across the three newly published essays, Quentin Meillassoux contextualizes the character of the faun in Mallarmé’s poem; Noé Soulier assesses the embodied translation of “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun” in Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet; and Han Han and Vincent Lostanlen consider the trajectory of timbre, from the enlightenment to our computational present.
Florian Hecker is a German artist whose works across synthetic sound, installation, and performance consider sensory perception and the audience's auditory experience. He has collaborated with artists including Aphex Twin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Russell Haswell, Mark Leckey, and Yasunao Tone.
Written and produced by Florian Hecker, 2017/2024
Texture and voice analysis and resynthesis algorithms: Axel Röbel, and members of the Analysis/ Synthesis Team, IRCAM, Paris
Sound spatialization design: Alberto de Campo
Original FAVN libretto: Robin Mackay
Mastering: Rashad Becker
A hitherto-unreleased electronic masterpiece from Roland Kayn, singular pioneer of cybernetic music.
Over a period spanning the late 70s through the early 80s, Kayn (1933–2011) issued a quintet of extended works that quietly but definitively redrew the map of electronic music. Informed by cybernetics and a desire to actualise analogue circuitry as an agency in the compositional process, this music adopted a form that can only be described as oceanic, as side after side of vinyl allowed a wholly new vocabulary of electronic sound to find its shape.
In the decades that followed, these multi-LP boxed-set releases became hallowed documents of contemporary music (as well as highly prized collectors' items). Kayn's initially subtle influence belied a gradual shift towards the widespread adoption of his ideas and practices in the 21st century, incorporating both the rise in popularity of modular synthesis as a music-making tool, and the huge advancements in machine learning and AI.
Following the recent reissue of 'Simultan' (1977) and the first-time release of late work 'A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound' (2009), it was clear that a new generation of listeners and musicians were eager to discover Kayn's vision in all its vastness.
Kayn's own label, Reiger Records Reeks, has been reawakened by his daughter Ilse, and her long-cherished dream of releasing this music is now finally a reality. Across 10 CDs of immersive audio, expertly remastered by Kayn aficionado Jim O'Rourke, listeners are now finally able to digest Kayn's little-known masterpiece, and to inhabit sonic territory that has waited unspoilt for decades.
CD 1: Sonagram, Nomogram, Polygram
CD 2: Cycloids I, Cycloids II
CD 3: Anisotropic Modulations I & II
CD 4: Anisotropic Modulations III & IV
CD 5: Anisotropic Modulations V, VI (Part 1) & VII (Part 2)
CD 6: Networks I, II & III
CD 7: Networks IV & V
CD 8: Radi, Intermodulation, Allotropic Radi
CD 9: Inverted Spaces, Counter Radi
CD 10: Array, Scanned Modulation
Recorded 1982-1983. This CD edition was mastered from the original archive tapes.