Sonology

Alexis Vallejos: Classical guitarist Alexis Vallejos is one of the most important Chilean musicians of his generation. Winner of the 19th Andrés Segovia International Classical Guitar Competition (Linares, Spain), he has made successful concert tours in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Alexis Vallejos began his musical studies at the age of 18 with maestro Romilio Orellana in the Department of Music and Sonology at the University of Chile Faculty of Arts. He then earned a Master’s degree in Classical Guitar from the University of Alicante in Spain, where he studied with some of the most important guitar and lute teachers: Hopkinson Smith, Manuel Barrueco, David Russell, Ignacio Rodes, Carles Trepat, Roberto Aussel, José de Eusebio and Nigel North. He has won major awards in national and international contests. Besides being unanimously awarded First Prize at the 19th Andrés Segovia International Guitar Competition, he has also received awards in international competitions in various countries in Europe and the Americas.

Returning to the unreleased oeuvre of the master of cybernetic sound Roland Kayn, frozen reeds hereby unveils a new high watermark for longform electroacoustic composition, unfolding across 15 CDs in a luxurious gold-stamped boxed set. Big tip! In 1970, Roland Kayn began a decades-long period of research, development and creation at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht. In the mid to late 90s, he retired, relocated to the Dutch countryside, and began to realise new electronic works at Reiger Recording Studio – his modest home facility. “I finally came to the conclusion,” Kayn would later point out, “that I no longer needed studios to construct my own electronic music.” The working methods Kayn arrived at individually – without the room-filling synthesisers, mixing desks and signal-processing equipment of Sonology at his disposal – saw him turning his own career into a cybernetic process. From the hours of recorded sound amassed in prior decades, he began processing and assembling a mountainous quantity of new music. His works of this period are focused on reabsorbing and recontextualising his life’s work to produce yet another series of utterly alien landscapes.

A shapeshifting group performing the compositions of Mike Smith in Toronto and environs. Recorded by Sandro Perri at Sonology, except for all the DI junk that Mike did at home.