An Aachen experimentalist working since 1981: the human foil in the Rowenta/Khan duo, and a conceptual sound artist whose solo work runs from dada collage to severe room recordings.
Frank Rowenta is the German experimental musician who served as the foil in the Rowenta/Khan duo on Dom Elchklang, and the Bureau files him at Tier III as a real, decade-long figure of the Aachen underground. Born in the city in 1966, he has lived and worked there throughout, drawn to experimental music since school, making his own records since 1981 and taking part in the local tape scene through the 1980s. He performs rarely and by choice.
His first widely-heard work was the partnership with Achim P. Li Khan of HNAS. The Rowenta/Khan records, Tiefpunkte moderner Tonkompositionen, Stereo Extrem, Avantgarde Explosion, Sofavision and others, are dense dada and plunderphonic collages, mixing found sound, German radio-play fragments, oriental and orchestral music, lectures, adverts and field recordings into something dark and weird, close to HNAS and to Negativland, with a melancholy running under the absurdity. A point worth making plainly: Rowenta is often linked to HNAS but was never a member. His connection ran through Khan and the Dom Elchklang circle, as a collaborator and label-mate rather than an insider of the parent group.
Away from the duo he built a conceptual solo practice. Solo records such as Schuss in den Ofen and Weingüter appeared on Dom Elchklang, and later the Raumstudien series on Gruenrekorder pushed further into process: recordings of a room in which two automatic rhythm devices modify themselves over hours, with nothing else happening. The limited span of each piece, hours rather than days, is what makes it a composition rather than an installation, and the work lies at the most extreme and patient end of sound art without tipping into mere idea.
Since the project moved online he has run his own Jeans Records, his base for further collaborations with Pruditsch of Tarkatak, Hjuler and others. His temperament is consistent across all of it: an avowed opponent of the zapping mentality and a defender of the slow, difficult listen, with an academic bent he is happy to admit, fitting for a musician whose first loved record was Stockhausen.
The Bureau files Frank Rowenta at Artists · Tier III as the human foil to Khan's fictions and a figure in his own right: the Dom Elchklang collaborator who took the collage method out of the cluster and into a severe, principled conceptual practice, and kept at it for forty years.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene