Album: Frank Genius is Star Struck
Author: Dmitry Vasilyev
Publication: IEM (source)
Date: 06/14/2009

There were some years passed by since that time I've released the collection of archive materials by Frank Rothkamm, and it seems that recently his activity is growing more and more, he released a handful of new albums presenting his unique artistic views and experiments. Published mainly by his own Flux Records imprint, they got several attention in the musical world.

This new album is also released by Flux Records in the Fall of 2008, but in a smaller form because it's a CDR with probably less copies and also duration time only half an hour.

Here Frank show us his skills in stylization, he tries to synthetise a series of pieces based on popmusic samples and primitive musical elements, but using the same complicated computer algorhythms that can be found in his more sophisticated works.

Well, the artificial intelligence probably needs for relaxation, to follow the way of its creators. For sure, this music is much more accessible than the abstract and out-of-body experiments you know from the digital entertainment examples by Mego label residents. I would like to compare the result with plunderphonic productions of The Tape-Beatles and Negativland, but again - Rothkamm pieces are more fragmented and bears not so much ideology, they are quite hermetic in the sense of culturology - maybe this is a good chance to remember The Residents attitude.

The formal imaging and extreme accuracy for which Rothkamm is known at best, it didn't changed much even for his pop experiments. At last, as you all know, the pop music always consume the avantgarde inventions, but maybe it's a good idea to reverse this tendency?

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