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Radiation Variations (2003​-​2007)

by Frank Rothkamm

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Catalog No: FLX100
Title: Radiation Variations
Sound Artist: Frank Rothkamm
Visual Artist: Holger Rothkamm
Label: Flux Records
Length: 45:56 (2756s)
Composed: 2003-2007
Location: Hollywood
New York
Instruments: Korg Legacy MS20
Kawai K5
Moog Voyager
Atari Formula
Yamaha FB01
Yamaha TX7
Release Date: 2/15/2017
Format: Digital
File Under: synthesizer music

The Fluidmaster is a device inside the toilet tank. It keeps your toilet from flooding your bathroom. Between 2003 and 2007 I had no idea how this works because a landlord usually sent somebody to fix it. That is why the music on this release, the ‘Radiation Variations’ sounds so different to the music I compose today in 2017. Now, I am the lord of the manor. Then, I could just go about my business. Today I have to take care of it. Everyday. In the bygone days of the ‘Radiation Variations’ I was carefree about matters of fluidmastery and deeply involved in realtime sound synthesis, usually while under the influence of a computer algorithm. Intuitive processes executed on an artificially intelligent system which I called IFORMM. But it was not human intelligence that guided me. This electronic music synthesizer had a keyboard and many knobs and sliders. However, the relationship between movement and sound, between cause and effect, was not necessarily linear. Stochastic random processes kept things both uncertain and statistically correct which led to a sort of musical quantum universe. At first this only affected the macro parameter of pitch. Melodies got weird. Then it spread like a virus all the way to down to the micro parameters of the instrument, the timbre itself. I always emphasized that this is purely electronic music, synthesized from the fundamental building blocks of sound. Our natural environment and the instruments of humans on earth are statistically insignificant and a mere accidental subset of the universe. We are alone and no one cares. There is however one thing that still connects us to our origins, or as Aristotle would say, to our ‘prime mover’, a thermal radiation left over from the time of 378,000 years after the Big Bang. It is the cosmic microwave background, an omnipresent radiation throughout the whole universe, discovered by accident in 1964 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. All possible music in the universe can be obtained from a variation on this cosmic microwave background. We can return to the source. At least, that is what I thought in the carefree days between 2003 and 2007. Now, if you excuse me, I have to go replace the Fluidmaster.

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released February 16, 2017

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Frank Rothkamm Los Angeles, California

Prolific, L.A. based German composer & artist.

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