Kangding Ray

Kangding Ray is an electronic music producer, born in France, and based in Berlin. His debut album for Raster-Noton Stabil was a sharp, glitchy set that incorporated acoustic and sampled-and-looped elements. Since his debut on Raster-Noton, Kangding Ray has undergone a continuous transformation of his sound, led by a rare attention to sound texture and a constant avant-gardist attitude.

Its 2008 follow-up, Automne Fold<https://www.allmusic.com/album/automne-fold-mw0000792406>, was markedly more song-oriented, a potential gateway into the Raster-Noton label's less traditionally accessible releases. The 2010 EP Pruitt Igoe, which featured remixes by Alva Noto and Ben Frost, found him sculpting his broken, distorted rhythms into something closer to danceable, and the 2011 full-length OR was a masterful blend of club rhythms and chilling post-industrial atmospheres. In 2012, Kangding Ray began releasing material on the Berlin-based Stroboscopic Artefacts label (the explosive Monad XI EP and a split 12" with Pfirter), as well as a more streamlined techno 12" for Raster-Noton called The Pentaki Slopes. Another Stroboscopic EP, Tempered Inmid appeared in 2013.

His more recent raster-noton albums 'Solens Arc' and 'Cory Arcane' define new boundaries in industrial-influenced post-techno, crafting uncompromisingly physical music that draw on his background as a trained architect: defined sonic surfaces and planes dissolve and flicker into motion, conjuring at once bleak and yet emotionally intimate spaces.

Kangding Ray performed at raster-noton’s 20th Anniversary celebration in 4DSOUND at ZKM in Karlsruhe.