With his parallel pasts in commercial graphic design and in the underground avant-pop group Ag Geige, Frank Bretschneider is a true musician for the digital age. The co-founder of Chemnitz, Germany's acclaimed Rastermusic label, Bretschneider is also an active participant in the Rastermusic roster, where he is represented as Komet, Produkt, and as a member of the collaborative Signal project.
Sound and digital design meet in the intoxicating pixel music of RAND. Bretschneider patterns twinkling synthetic tones, electronic noises, and fragmentary microscopic beats with a melodically inclined ear and a sense for spatial composition. The 20 monosyllabic miniatures on RAND range from sparse and provocative chromatic spatters ("Pond," "Land") to exciting juxtapositions of frequency and texture ("Nox," "Term," "Watt") or rhythm and timbre ("Mai," "Mol," "Verb," "Mark"). Bretschneider is less a musical minimalist than a student of economical aesthetics. Each piece employs just enough structural substance to crystallize its fragile form. Taken as a whole, RAND is like a gallery display of modern artwork--a presentation of challenging ideas that dazzles the eye and delights the mind.