Peter Frohmader is an innovator of the second generation of German electronic music. Different from most electronic music artists, he is only marginally influenced by the cosmic sound of Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze. His music leads to the underworld and creates a sinister and nightmarish atmosphere. Frohmader has released numerous albums, but most of them came out on little labels, so they did not gain the attention they deserved.
Already a pupil, Peter Frohmader started to record tapes with alienated sounds in the early '70s and later formed amateur bands like Kanaan and Alpha Centauri. In 1981, he released his first LP, Musik Aus dem Schattenreich. Frohmader got his inspiration from movies like Nosferatu, books of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. So it is not surprising that especially the early works are very dark and disturbing. The excessive use of bass guitars beside the electronics is striking.
Peter Frohmader is also a talented painter and studied art and graphic design. His mystic airbrush paintings often were used for record covers. The famous Swiss artist H.R. Giger, creator of the alien monster in the movie of the same name, became attentive to him and they co-operated on his film Second Celebration of the Four. Music for TV movies and documentaries followed.
Besides his solo albums, Peter Frohmader has worked with musicians of Amon Düül, Embryo, and Emtidi. In the early '90s, two albums were released in the United States and focused the attention of a wider public to his music. Later works withdrew from the ghostly music of the early days and integrate elements of ambient, neo-classical, and new age music. Peter Frohmader collaborated with guitarist Richard Pinhas of French band Heldon and Russian composer Artemiy Artemiev and had various exhibitions of his graphic art and releases several albums of his own music.

Peter Frohmader is a veteran of the German music world, having been a composer and mult-instrumentalist for thirty years. I've only really encountered his music [up till now] via his collaborations on Electroshock Records with Artemiy Artemiev. So the opportunity to hear him solo was a very attractive one. 2001 is a very electronic album in all the best senses of the word - it's full of synths, sequencers and samplers, and the music is both wild, dangerous and unpredictable. What it isn't is the now bog standard drum and bass dross that clutters up the cd racks in the shops. 2001 reminds me a little of Brian Eno when he is in full 'on' mode, rather than his ambient one. Yet 2001 is resolutely musical, the ten tracks offer some extremely fiery soundscapes that mix ambience, industrial backdrops and brain-drilling rhythms in equal measure. It's difficult to pick out one or two tracks that stand out from the rest, the album shares a cohesiveness that is positively frightening. But I was rather partial to the rather flighty Etheral Dance, the pulsing Cell with its action movie-type theme, and gamelan-inspired Java Talk. There's a trend in modern electronic music to be 'chill', whatever that is supposed to mean, but 2001 bucks that trend by being as in your face as it can without resorting to discordancy and inscoherence. It is an album full of life and with a deep love for life.