Album: Frank Genius is Star Struck
Author: Ed Pinsent
Publication: The Sound Projector (source)
Date: 03/09/2009

German experimenter and conceptualist Frank Rothkamm has released Frank Genius Is Star Struck (FLUX RECORDS FLX10), a record I can only describe as avant-garde disco and sample music.

He put it together in 1990-1991 using Atari software to programme his samplers and synths, he calls it a ‘digital cantata’, and apparently it even has autobiographical elements layered into its wayward sounds and rhythms. I’m totally unfamiliar with the language and conventions of breaks, beats, house, old skool, and all myriad variations thereof, but even I can tell there is something fundamentally warped about this music, hearing past the surface sheen of the poppy beats to discover discordant and disturbing anti-melodies lurking within.

As ever, the sleeve notes and press (quite possibly prepared by Rothkamm himself) are ambiguous, leaving it deliberately unclear as to where the joke leaves off and the conceptual art begins.

“File under Dialectic Poptronics”, we are advised…

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