Queen Elizabeth Hall
South Bank Centre, London
7th May 2000
It’s City Slang‘s birthday – ten years old and going stronger than ever at the interface of good old-fashioned Post-Indie Rock, Country dispatches from the edge and exuberent German Electronica. Tonights show is the first London event, featuring the latter stylings in the shape of Dirk Dresselhaus‘s bubbly bleep outfit SchneiderTM and the ever-evolving melodies of To Rococo Rot. Somehow Schneider have expanded by 300% for this show, with Dresselhaus flanked by various intense cohorts and their boxes of tricks, and together they produce a near-chaotic mishmash of generally upbeat rhythms and some quite quirky noises.
Perhaps there is a little of the cheesy on display tonight – a little of the DiscoTechnoPop muted by the surroundings, if only for the audience. No, Dirk is well up for it, punching the air, jerking like he’s been plugged straight into the MIDI setup and through into the back projections of virtual plasma balls, pixellated soundwaves and the rather smoothly-morphing effect made up by some clever little software which manages to visually translate the delay effects into sinous strands of what resembles very well-controlled plasticene. He and his companion on stage right are the most vibrantly active of the quartet, lighting up fags and throwing signs like they’re at the decks in a rave, not the decreasingly staid halls of British art culture.
The group are at their best when the closely-interlocked beats tumble back, around and straight through eash other, or for the devolution into stuttering minimal beats of limited repetiveness, but somehow SchneiderTM even manage to make The Smiths cover they do sound fun and groovy, even if almost unrecognisable – perhaps squarking the lyrics through a meta-vocoder load of effects rather than in a dreary moan helps. They may not save Electronica from eating itself, but Dresselhaus and company seem intent on having a massive amount of enjoyment while doing so.
To Rococo Rot are something else again; whatever Electronica might choose to be, they probably are the best,or at least most recognisable, of its exponents. Precisely because of their mutable, melodic, slippery sound, they worm their way away from easy defintion and into the realms of ineffability through the disarmingly simple expedient of being very good at what they do. What that is involves the near-perfect marrying of Ronald Lippok‘s drums, Stefan Schneider‘s deceptively simple electric dub basslines and Roland Lippok‘s push-button objects in flight cases. There’s more than that to the trick of course, and for this show they’ve got longtime collaborator and London live supplement Darryl Moore of Soul Static Sound back on side to bring his own brand of realtime manipulations to the mix again.
The results are still reassuringly smooth but never irritatingly slick; twinkling electronic frills which echo back to Düsseldorf circa 1975, warm dips into four-string groves of bass, brushed-up percussion which signify Jazz but rarely inflect those particular moves, just imply them instead – which is so, so much more effective. Every amble by Stefan Schneider to his Casio keyboard, each twist by Moore of the delay racks and CD controls moves the whole around the sussurating undertow of the Lippok’s shuffling rhythms and playfully mechanistic melodies. As ever, the blending of sample loops with live drums is a model of the form, and when one train of thought is persuaded to follow an uncoiling linkage of synthetic shimmer, something else entirely will reveal itself, the bass return, a perfectly reasonable set of glitches will intervene, and the To Rococo Rot magic is worked again. Thank You, City Slang, for the encouragement of such marvels.
-Antron S. Meister-
