Album: FB01
Author: Massimo Ricci
Publication: TOUCHING EXTREMES (source)
Date: 05/27/2006

Frank Holger Rothkamm is a composer and computer programmer whose work I already had the pleasure of meeting in the past, in excellent collaborations with the likes of Alfred 23 Harth and Elliott Sharp.

The FB01 is the very first Yamaha digital synthesizer module, an instrument whose architecture allows the creation - in Frank's words - of complex sounds with minimal effort. These tracks demonstrate this theory in full, generating an astonishing variety of unusual geometries and movements in the aural space, without a chance for our sense of intuition to predict their direction.

We're taken back to the times where "serious" computer artists tried to open a whole new world of sonic possibilities (which, thanks to people like Rothkamm, are probably still there); it seems like an eternity ago, but I used to dream about extreme advances in the development of human perception, spirals and parabolas of sinewaves fluctuating in my room announcing the end of my listening habits.

The obscure realms visited by this gentleman's music are a vivid recollection of mental galaxies that are no more: the era of the preset has swallowed any spare intelligence in the world of electronica, yet "FB01" gives hope and - why not? - returns us some of that evolutional feeling.

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