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  Living Tunes LT 125.601 - 2002 

One has got used to the fact that contemporary electronic music comes out of computers. This wasn’t always so and must not be inevitably so today. All electronic instruments also have audio outputs to be connected with analogous sound mixers and thus can be recorded track for track in real time - so to speak „live“ . This way electronic instruments can be played just as „genuinely“ as conventional acoustic or electrically amplified instruments. It’s new, though, for many modern electronic instruments that they do not necessarily sound „electronic“ any longer but can produce very convincing natural basic sounds as saxophone, piano, Hammond organ, drums et cetera that can be changed and alienated electronically and electro-acoustically. Furthermore it’s new that electronic instruments must no longer be operated exclusively with the help of keyboards. Almost every conventional instrument provided with a corresponding pickup can produce the input signals for a synthesizer. Frank Gingeleit’s „Nightmares & Escapades“ is a CD with modern electronic music that completely refrains from loops, samples and computer processing: a guitar, a guitar synthesizer, effects, an anologous mixing console connected with a digital recorder - and nothing else.

Thematically, the debut is about „little escapes“ from nightmares („Nightmares & Escapades“) that can lead into the Himalaya („Everest! - And Then?“), the jungle („Going Native“), abstract geometry („Abstract Jazz“, „Fractals“) and the space - toward the end there’s some kind of a „space corner“ with a surreal jingle for an advertising campaign for space tourism („Go Space, Young Man“), almost „rapping“ extraterrestrials („X-Tra-Terrestial Language Studies“) and a mixture of  industrial and space noise („The Industrialization of Mars“). The musical base is accessible Ambience and Rock with experimental and avant-garde elements. The compositions are strict and free at the same time. The strictness can be seen in the clear harmonic structures. Also apparent dissonances or sound effects prove to be enharmonic and composed when listening carefully. Even wind noises and the percussion are „tuned“ in the respective keys. Some pieces follow the classical sonata movement form with several „themes“, clear developments and arranged codas. In others it’s only the unusual instrumentation that covers up late romantic and neo-classical figures. The element of freedom can be seen in the instrumentation and the sonic colors. In some tunes the sythesizer sounds in connection with Jazz and Rock Style guitar sounds can hardly be distinguished from each other in the mix. Together they create for example piano-like sounds or orchestral colorings without a syn-piano or artificial strings being in the game. One part of the structural freedom is the unrestrained flow of exhausting sound patterns and composed passages. In „Fractals“ one could think that a Jazz style guitar solo must start every moment, that, however, is always indicated only in single tones. Again other pieces require a more or less own compositional and associative performance by the listener, for example to recognize the modern equivalent of a Working Man’s Blues in the last tune „The Industrialization of Mars“.

Putting the played notes and effects used together by the listener is altogether a constitutive element of the music. In this respect „Nightmares & Escapades“ goes considerably beyond other modern electronic compositions that call for the listener’s „acoustic sense of touch“ for the emotional completion of the compository „textures“. And this is the risk or, if you like, the „weak point“ of the CD accepted by the composer: It is percieved differently by every listener, from great listening pleasure through more or less significant background noises up to a discordant mishmash. Gingeleit’s music fills neither intellectual nor emotional blanks but produces the impression of richness or emptiness depending on disposition and listening experience, evokes multilayered pictures or leaves a feeling of randomness and boredom. A serious recommendation to buy the CD can therefore be given only to those who take the same risk with music that occasionally arises at sophisticated literature: one can fail at it. In this meaning „Nightmares & Escapades“ isn’t entertaining music either. In its general gesture the CD ties to the early Seventies when there was a little time window in which a kind of music came into being that referred to something completely different from the mainstream of popular music prevailing up to this day. Gingeleit’s point in „Nightmares & Escapades“ is to work artistically on existential topics beyond fixated genres, accepting the possible consequence not to be able to realize this in the perception of all listeners.