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Lost in The Deep Blue has been described as the almost subterranean dream of a great guitarist and composer who is able to express the elemental qualities of human experience and universal consciousness. Compared to the most sophisticated part of the American cultural heritage (Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Theolonius Monk, Sun Ra...) in US media the German guitarist Frank Gingeleit has decided to leave the “immaculate underground”, and to offer his latest CD to a record label and hence to a broader audience. His previously released three CDs were available as self-produced private publications that earned him some fame in the proximity of the “big names” in Ambient, Rock and experimental Electronica among listeners of contemporary avant-garde music. Always dependent on the listening experiences of the respective reviewers one could read names like Robert Fripp, Fred Frith, Brian Eno, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream related with his music which eventually convinced Gingeleit that he was no longer the hobby musician which he had regarded himself for quite a while.

Despite entering the “official” music market as a newcomer, Gingeleit can look back on a long experience in mixing styles and genres, the use of sophisticated studio techniques, and especially in tracking down rhythmic, harmonic and melodic connections never before heard like this – “outrageous” in the best sense of the word. Starting off from the avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, grounded on a solid understanding of Blues, Rock, Funk and Fusion, and conceptually based on the unorthodox and un-academic approach to music as in the Fluxus movement associated with John Cage and Maurizio Kagel a thoroughly independent music came into being, far away from the current eclecticism of indiscriminately tying together styles and genres whether they fit or not. Gingeleit’s instrumental means on Lost In The Deep Blue are the guitar and especially the guitar synthesizer whose voices – bass and drums, keyboard and effect sounds – provide the electronically achieved but natural sounding framework of the compositions. Gingeleit escapes the sterility and emotional ubiquity of the mainstream of contemporary electronic music by making a completely “un-electronic” use of electronic means. In his studio there are no computers or samplers, and about MIDI, the magical box of most modern music productions, he only knows that it exists. Correspondingly, Lost In The Deep Blue rather sounds like band performed than the result of self-forgotten sound tinkering.

In all art directions, among artists, critics and the audience there is an unerring instinct for perceiving something as “genuine”. A quite famous example for this is Franz Marc’s introductory essay for the manifest of the artists’ association called “The Blue Rider” where he puts a folk art illustration of a fairy tale alongside a picture by Kandinsky. Both have in common – in Marc’s words – the sensitivity of the artistic expression and their ability to set the soul vibrating in a new way. In this sense, Gingeleit’s music is also perceived as “genuine”. Beyond a rough orientation genre boundaries or ascriptions make no sense as “serious” and entertaining music, Jazz, Ambient, Rock and abstract Electronica merge in favour of “universal consciousness and humanity”, as the columnist of the L.A. X..Press put it. Asked how he himself would file his music Gingeleit replies that during the conception and production of  Lost In The Deep Blue he had something like “Radiohead for adults” in mind. It’s obvious that the result does not sound like Radiohead, but there are clear similarities as the lack of respect concerning genre boundaries, instrumentation prescriptions and compositional rules, and assuming the existence of a demanding audience. In both cases it’s the un-explicable and mysterious beyond eccentricity or New Age romanticism that makes the music so attractive despite its demands and sophistications.

(You can find additional Information about Lost In The Deep Blue on the new website www.livingtunes.com which was designed for the current label re-release.)

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