“I would describe what they do best as a kind of highly practiced amateurism, and it’s something I really value” Arto Lindsay recommends To Rococo Rot’s Veiculo, The Amateur View and Music Is a Hungry Ghost reissued in Rocket Road. 19972001 box set I first saw To Rococo Rot perform at a club called Tier 3 in New York in the late nineties. I remember them sitting onstage and playing repetitive electronic music by hand, note by note, beat by beat. The description makes it seem elementary, but what Stefan Schneider, Robert Lippok and Ronald Lippok did was a revelation: electronic, minimal and repetitive dance music that instead of being sequenced by a machine was played by humans. This, among other things, gave the performance a sort of heavy-handed pathos; what I always saw as an attractive, East German romanticism. That To Rococo Rot was “aligned” with the electronic music scene despite using acoustic instruments appeared to me to be both a major insight and their essential contribution. Everything else was a consequence of that. At the time, there was also an entire whole generation of producers from Germany and Austria who were closeted romantics (although some of them eventually became more open about it): Markus Popp, Fennesz, Tosca, Kruder & Dorfmeister, to name a few. Their romanticism came close to but somehow always avoided sappiness. I also detect a similarity between To Rococo Rot and the East German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai. In fact, the first time Carsten came to New York, I booked his show: a duet with New York turntablist
I-Sound, who would eventually go on to join To Rococo Rot on the third record in this box set, Music Is a Hungry Ghost (and my album Prize). To my ear, Carsten, To Rococo Rot and I-Sound share a fascination with irreducible electronics; sounds you can’t break down into component parts because they’re already subatomic—like small, bright and hard bits of indivisible digital distortion. I especially hear I-Sound emphasizing this aspect on tracks like “Pantone”. The musical sensibility on these three reissued albums reminds me of Another Green World by Brian Eno, which is the record that made me aware of how electronic music could be used in an expressive way. Suddenly I could really feel somebody’s hands manipulating the effects. I could sense the person behind the machine, altering the parameters of the electronics. Until I had that experience, most of the electronic music that I’d been exposed to was either repetitive dance music or electro-acoustic and based on a logic I couldn’t quite grasp. In contrast, To Rococo Rot and I share a non-musician’s approach to music, and I love the basic concept behind the band; the way they take one really simple idea and worry it, manipulate it, turn it over and look at it from a few angles before abandoning it. Listening to earlier records like Veiculo, it’s almost as if they don’t know
how to change chords, or that they only have enough musical knowledge to play something constant and unwavering . . . after which they don’t know where to go. Perhaps I hear a bit of my own frustration. Either way, I would describe what they do best as a kind of highly practiced amateurism, and it’s something I really value. They’re not professional musicians, but they use their limitations as a means to create interesting music. Or maybe I’m just reading all of this into it because there’s something about To Rococo Rot that makes them difficult to evaluate; something ineffable, something slight. It’s intriguing to note that these albums are not particularly old and yet are being reissued. Why? That’s a good question. It’s increasingly common in the age of streaming to encourage a reading of an album as “classic”—to imply weight when everything feels so weightless. At first glance, To Rococo Rot may seem like a minor band in the same way that literature written in a “minor” language was often dismissed before it was championed. I don’t want to force the comparison, but look at how long it took Fernando Pessoa to be recognized as a great poet writing in Portuguese, as opposed to English, French or Spanish. You could say the time is ripe for the value of lots of so-called minor artistic works to be reappraised. ~
(City Slang)
Arto Lindsay is a musician and producer who helped define a new generation of brutal, primitive noise music in the late seventies with legendary no wave pioneers DNA. He is also a regular contributor to Electronic Beats. In the last issue he reviewed Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE. EB 4/2012 29