Flux Records Releases "Reno" - The Skinny Lad and His Beefy House

Los Angeles, CA, December 07, 2011 --(PR.com)-- After Frank's last release "Amerika" - that even the composer's most well meaning critics found "super-disjointed" and "dissonantly enigmatic" - a dark period of 18 months engulfed him, forcing an unusual silence while he fought with mental health issues. Frank's long awaited return to the scene is with Amerika's exact opposite, a very accessible album of underground dance music. Frank wouldn't be Frank, however if "Reno" would not have its conceptual raison d'etre: Le Ballet Surmoderne (the supermodern ballet). He is clearly not thinking here about the ballet with its origins in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century. Instead, RENO's origins are based in the last decade of the 20th century, the time of the 2nd psychedelic revolution: the Rave movement in San Francisco. There he organized Raves and Rave-type happenings with go-go dancers from nightclubs. There, while performing in drag, he met his future wife and eternal muse Nina. But it was not until he arrived in New York that the idea of electronic dance music as a form of avant-garde composition - a ballet music independent of the club scene - was born.

The music he now composed was for a utopian ballet surmoderne in which the separation between dancer and spectator no longer exist, where every movement of everything is in equal relation to every other movement and in time with the rational clock of the universe. The clock is the ever-present bass drum ticking away at frequencies that the body can feel. The ballet's primary perception and experience is physical, expressing a dancing paradox: Every bar is different, but only minimally so; "Reno" is repetitive music, but there is really no repetition. With these ideas in his head he went out all over New York to find the support of 3 wise men, mainstays of the New York downtown scene, each shifting the paradigm of the classical composer: producer Peter Scherer, multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp, and intermedia artist Glove.

Alas, Frank continued to live as a skinny lad, under great stress and in poverty in New York. With his arthouse work "Frank Genius Presents Planet Genius" a commercial flop, he was unable to sign any kind of album deal or have an opportunity to stage his ballet music. In 1998 he moved to Los Angeles. "Reno" was left unpublished, a torso without head or limbs, until now.

"Reno" was scored in Cubase on an Atari ST computer, hooked-up to an orchestra of what today would be considered vintage synthesizers, samplers and drum machines, most of which share the reputation of being hard to program. This can now be considered a l'esprit de vie that runs through all of Frank's work. Not surprisingly, the drama of "Reno" as the invisible ballet surmoderne unfolds with a different style and soundset for each track. Because this dance music definitely has meat on its bones it's commonly referred to as Beefy House.

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