Album: RENO
Author: Ed Pinsent
Publication: Sound Projector (source)
Date: 03/11/2013

Frank Rothkamm‘s Reno (FLUX RECORDS FLX15) feels like a joke I don’t quite “get”. This German experimenter based in Los Angeles has excelled in providing witty tongue-in-cheek sleeve notes to his own releases of electronic music, sometimes so convoluted it’s impossible to tell when the joke leaves off, if indeed it ever does.
Reno is no exception; the written insert would like us to entertain the notion that’s it’s music for a futuristic, superhuman ballet, and was executed using a program on an old Atari system connected to a suite of synths, drum machines and sequencers, which we are invited to view as an “orchestra”.
Rothkamm refers in passing to rave culture in San Francisco, to New York downtown music producers, and to a genre laughingly called “Beefy House”, a term coined to express the idea that this music “has meat on its bones”.
In spite of all this good natured and chortle-worthy contextualising, all I hear on the record is very average identikit disco music. Wha…?

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