Album: Hillary Crossing the Delaware
Author: Massimo Ricci
Publication: Touching Extremes (source)
Date: 11/17/2016

For quite a while now, Frank Rothkamm has been fighting the repugnant habit of making people pay for crappy music through the only possible means, namely the opposite move: giving excellent music for free to the needful listeners. Most of Rothkamm’s recent work is released digitally; all it takes for a harmonically inquisitive human specimen is looking for the numerous sparklers scientifically disseminated by the TeutoCalifornian wizard over the years, and listen. An expanded discography from which we just need to pick and cherish.

So, how not to approve a 25-minute loop-based piece – built on “chamber ensemble” vintage synthesis and equally ancient software – as a classy refutation of the results of the US elections? Isn’t this better than resorting to Facebook, the greatest ever instrument of mass control, to post tons of commonplaces that will never change a status quo determined decades in advance for every single region of the globe? My answer is yes; it is much better. Hillary Crossing The Delaware unfolds slowly, its tranquil pace allowing a detached outlook upon the ugliness surrounding us, in the meantime keeping the mental activity of an unbiased observer running in “full efficiency” mode. The stochastic concomitance of randomly superimposed reiterations generate a compound of occasional ravishing beauty – when the instrumental voices align sympathetically inside the spontaneous counterpoint – and “what’s that?” perplexity as an inevitable small percentage of relative insignificance is born from the absence of so-called “logical” choices in the score. The final outcome corresponds to the exercising of dejection and negativity as driving forces to establish a measure of improvement. And Rothkamm knows well that any real improvement always derives from the vibrational core and, in turn, the brain of lonesome entities, if gifted enough and devoid of “teachings” not descending from their individual perception.

Together we stand; divided, we still stand.

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