Album: FB01
Author: Gottfried Michael Koenig
Publication: Instituut voor Sonologie (source)
Date: 05/27/2006

Dear Frank,

Thank you very much for sending me your CD FB01. I listened to the six pieces with great satisfaction. Your concept of pure electronic music, based on sinewaves only, strikes a responsive cord, although I have never restricted myself to sinewaves. I am therefore astonished that so many different sounds can be derived from such a small basis -- Stockhausen might have had such an abundance of sounds in mind when coming back from Paris where he made his first experiments before returning to Cologne. But working with only generators and tape has not enabled us to unfold the sinewave into complex sounds that only became possible with the help of the computer.

If I may make a critical remark, it concerns the way that sounds react to one another. It is often as if they had come straight out of a (very rich) catalogue (like a painter's colours from tubes), instead of being derived from one another, thereby strengthening their formal coherence. A second remark would apply to the fact that the sounds are mainly successive and that overlay is produced when a second sound begins while a first one is still sounding. In my opinion sounds refer to one another not only in time (because of their sequence), but also in space (because of their simultaneity) -- or is this idea too 'instrumental' to your taste?

Whatever the case, I enjoyed the CD very much indeed. Many thanks.


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