Rothko Spaces, Volume 2 by Stephan Thelen & Markus Reuter
Release date: September 6, 2024Label: Self-Released / Iapetus
From the liner notes written by Stephan Thelen, American painter Mark Rothko famously said, “The only theme noble enough for art is tragedy”. That was the quote Stephan told Markus Reuter after they first met on April 22nd of this year at Castle Studios, close to Dresden, Germany. The genesis behind the Rothko Spaces project was in the first volume with David Torn who used his electric guitar to create distortion and feedback with a string orchestra to go along with it.
In the next chapter, he and Reuter take it a step further by moving from its orchestral atmosphere into Reuter’s touch guitar-like arrangements. What Markus is doing is creating feedback ideas by taking it to the next level. Creating this massive sound system with five cranked-up tube amps that makes up the whole tracking room vibrate and having a life of its own.
Listening to the second volume of the Rothko Spaces, you feel as if you’re watching the collaboration, unfold in front of your very eyes. But it’s not just Thelen and Reuter, but fellow comrade Jon Durant, who lends the duo a helping hand with his signature cloud guitar to one of the compositions which is featured on ‘A Safe Haven’.
Durant’s cloud guitar adds in these death tone vibes which come out of nowhere to make it sound like a massive wave of distortion coming from Dead Aunt Thelma’s Studio in Portland, adding in the rumbling techniques in which is used on the second volume. The four-part suite, ‘No Way Out’ adds in the orchestral vibes Thelen brings to the table, letting listeners know, he’s got more tricks up his sleeve.
The pounding from Reuter’s touch guitar with its shrieking tones, the level of insanity inside Arkham Asylum has just gotten more intense to see more of the criminals becoming more and more bat-shit crazy, to see what kind of graphic details they’ll come up with next. Most of the time, Thelen has written this piece, either as an alternate score for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, A Death in the Family, Batman: Three Jokers, Tod Phillips’ Joker, or for the 1988 controversial graphic novel of Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke.
Thelen pulls all of the stop signs out, reveals the disturbing imagery of the psychosis, sadistic sense of humor, the killing, and the torture’s he has done to make the Bat family’s life, a living hell. This does feel like a score to The Killing Joke in which I’ve mentioned before, but Thelen has taken us into this massive hallway of mirrors reflecting the damage the Joker has done.
The duo’s soundscape is a walk to the unknown with unexpected twists and turns that has given us a chance to cross our fingers for the third volume of the Rothko Spaces project.
