Bureau B The mid- to late nineties was a pretty purple patch for German electronica and it coincided with a similar flurry of genre-less electronic based bands arriving from the States. The beauty of the German acts, like those that preceded them, was the lack of obvious Western tradition and unlike the bands from the seventies, a greater access to and greater complicity with the new electronic instruments. […]
To Rococo Rot
8 posts
Label: Staubgold Format: CD What better subject for a To Rococo Rot concept album than a highly modernist building in Cologne? With twelve modular rooms to work represent both the structure and purpose of, the logical method the band took was to compose a three minute track for each section. What emerges is a stripped-down album which works within the structural constraints to deliciously minimal effect, whether on […]
Label: City Slang (Europe)/Mute (North America) Format: CDS,12″ The Pantone EP brings together a selection of tracks originally aired on To Rococo Rot and I-Sound’s Music Is A Hungry Ghost album, here revised in light of live performance. “Pantone (Red)” whirrs out from an opening skim across the glitchscape into a tinkly melody, all trailed echoes of brightly-sparking electronics and the characteristic TRR bass glide. The synthetic strings […]
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 […]
Label: City Slang Format: CD, LP From their beginnings as the musical department of an art exhibition, To Rococo Rot have shown themselves to be something special – it’s not the methodology alone, not the combination of sequencer, sampler, drums and the sometimes floor-threatening bass they favour live, but is to be found in the precise combination of all the above with that special spark of warm humanity […]
Irregular #5 The South Bank Centre, London 8th-10th April 1999 The last five to ten years have seen an exponential rise in the number of intriguing events at London’s premier Arts Council-funded cultural centre on the South Bank of the River Thames, thanks to an innovative booking policy and the success of the events themselves, expanding the venue beyond its associations with Radio 3 “serious” music concerts and […]
Po Na Na’s, London 2nd November 1998 Po Na Na’s is a bit of a new venue in London, emerging from underneath a pub on the increasingly busy (musically as well as with traffic) Highbury Corner, and decorated in a faux-Moroccan style which actually suits the sounds emerging from The Third Eye Foundation‘s DAT player and mixer quite nicely. Matt Elliot tweaks levels and twiddles knobs to suit […]
Label: Fat Cat Format: 12″ Supremely mellow, fascinatingly layered micro-dubs from a country (Germany) teeming with super-proficient Electronica. Ripples, pulses, flows and then grows. Crackles, lo-fi sound sources and bass bleeps celeverly arranged to produce an all-suffusing glow of satisfying serenity, without descent into Ambient earwash. Why don’t record players have repeat buttons? -Freq1C-