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| Frank Rothkamm [ Amerika ]
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Print Edition  |
$11.99  |
| FLAC Edition |
$ 8.99 |
| MP3 Edition |
$ 5.99 |
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| [Amerika] PLAY [ complete album ] |
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Flux Records (Los Angeles), in conjunction with Bad Alchemy (Franconia), is delighted to present Amerika (FLX14), a CD with 4to pamphlet by German-American artist Frank Rothkamm (b.1965). This 4th and final chapter of Rothkamm's TETRALOGY opens on the 4th of July of 2010.
Amerika consists of a Compact Disc on which a Fuller Projection map is overlaid onto a printed-wood surface, which is housed in a shrink-wrapped vinyl record-style sleeve. The 4to pamphlet contains 4 pages of text - 3 of which are printed in 3 primary colors - and contains spirit communications by Klara and Karl May.
The 73 minute content of the CD is shaped by the moment-form concepts of mid-century modernists and presents reformations of 4 Songs from the American Songbook and an Overture. The music was especially composed for a 1954 WurliTzer Spinet piano.
Permalink:
http://rothkamm.com?amerika
EDITOR'S NOTES
Frank Rothkamm
Frank Holger Rothkamm was born in 1965 in Gütersloh, Germany. He studied Piano, Violin and Science of Harmony at the Music Schools of Nürtingen and Moers. His solo piano and organ albums include just 3 organs (2003-2008), Opus Spongebobicum (2005-2008) and Zahra Fugues (2008-2009). In 1976 he gave his first piano recital at a nursing home, playing the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart variations of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".
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| Catalog No: |
BA66 / FLX14 |
| Artist: |
Frank Rothkamm |
| Title: |
Amerika |
| Label: |
Bad Alchemy / Flux Records |
| Format: |
CD |
| Length: |
72:58 |
| Parts: |
Vinyl style sleeve(4/4)
Compact Disc(4/4)
shrink-wraped
4to booklet |
| File Under: |
supermodern classical piano |
| Release Date: |
July 04, 2010 |
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| [Amerika] Cover |
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| [Amerika] 4to |
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| Tracklisting: |
opus |
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| [01] Frank Rothkamm Overture |
475 |
14:26 |
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| [02] Frank Rothkamm Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child |
476 |
15:09 |
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| [03] Frank Rothkamm The Band Played On |
477 |
17:34 |
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| [04] Frank Rothkamm Pomp and Circumstance |
478 |
11:35 |
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| [05] Frank Rothkamm You’re in the Army Now |
479 |
14:14 |
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| Reviews: |
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For Amerika (2010), the headstone of TETRALOGY, Rothkamm plays a 1954 Wurlitzer Spinet Piano.
After an "Overture" with a real edge that reminds me of Charles Ives, follow very free variations of 4 well-known pieces. The spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" may be good for an universal deep sigh, but originates in America's recent past as an Apartheid state. Hardly recognizable, it sounds as if Rothkamm would recommend to motherless children cobble stones instead of prayers.
"The Band Played On", written 1895 by John F. Palmer & Charles B. Ward, was so popular that sparrows could sing from rooftops the first line "Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde", which in 1941 became the title of a movie by Raoul Walsh starring Rita Hayworth as the eponymous strawberry-blonde heroine. Rothkamm transforms even this romantic small-town comedy into a grotesque of national scope and he charges the verse "Well, his brain was so loaded It nearly exploded The poor girl would shake with alarm" so explosively and alarmed as if were about quite a different matter. How? By sounding sometime like Ligeti improvised, and then again as tactile as a holy relationship.
By Edward Elgar"s "Pomp und Circumstance" the martial undertone matching Othello's "the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, ... Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!" exactly provides the leaf that Rothkamm rips to pieces. Simply by un-pomping the pomp, and converting the march into an elegy.
"You're in the Army Now" also was eponymous for a Jimmy Durante comedy in 1941, before it become a hit by Status Quo in 1986. Although one could sing it as an anti-war song too, it is more often in use as a jar head hymn. Again the deconstruction is radical. What remains of Elgar's march and the bawling of recruits, is beyond recognition, brittle, somber, and as un-singable as a Boulez "Sonata" or a Stockhausen "Klavierstück".
Is America wandering on a Lost Highway? The cover image which depicts half of a cowboy with his back to the hills, where the American Dream once envisioned the New Jerusalem, seems to indicate it.
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 Rigobert Dittmann BAD ALCHEMY
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