Artist : To Rococo Rot
Album : Speculation
Year : 2010
Genre : Electronic
Quality : LAME 3.97 -V2 --vbr-new (179kbps) / 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo
Date : 07-04-2010
Playtime : 44:55 min
Size : 10 Track(s): 55.97MB
Source : WEB (WAV)
Cat.Num : WIG234D
Label : Domino Records
01. Away 4:20
02. Seele 4:03
03. Horses 4:06
04. Forwardness 4:12
05. No Way To Prepare 0:32
06. Working Against Time 3:48
07. Place It 5:16
08. Ship 4:45
09. Bells 3:13
10. Fridays 10:40
http://bleep.com/index.php?page=release_details&releaseid=24167
The artwork of Speculation, To Rococo Rot's seventh album and their first in six
years, sees an arm reaching into grey space to unlock a panoply of coiled,
wound, frayed and notched wires. Though circling in on each other, and
replicating structures across the visual field, there's something unruly about
the way the dense, steely material folds and curls on itself. Here's the thing:
Through repetition, incremental change becomes apparent, and everything's
connected, even at its most improvised and uncertain. It's as good a metaphor
for To Rococo Rot's music as you're likely to get.
If it's brave for a group to go out in their 15th year and call their album
Speculationùby now, according to rock lore, they should be on the downward
slide, repeating one idea to diminishing returnsùit's also a good marker of how
To Rococo Rot continue to function. Back in 1997 they were calling their
instruments "tools," analogising their laminar, instrumental songwriting with
the fluidity of the contemporary, multimedia arts that were burgeoning across
the EU, and thinking through relationships between their micro-managed riffs and
the repetitions of everyday life. Nowadays, To Rococo Rot sometimes sound
vaguely anachronistic, given the way minimal techno has leapfrogged electronica
and IDM in the collective conscious of electronic music fans, but this works to
their advantage: there's really still nobody who does this thing (ticking,
shuttling, film-projector rhythms, Stefan Schneider's plangent, melodic bass
melodies, the clicks, hums and gurgles of their collective kit's central nervous
system) remotely as wellùif ever.
Speculation was mostly recorded at the studio of Krautrock legends Faust, which
accounts for Jochen Irmler's appearance, on spiky, treble-overload organ, on the
ten-minute unravel of the closing "Friday." It's niceùTo Rococo Rot goes out to
sea with their predecessorsùbut what comes before is the revelation. While
they've often included acoustic instrumentation, or simulated acoustica, in
their armoury, on Speculation it's often upfront, structuring the songs. The
three-note piano refrain that serves as "Seele"'s backbone is oddly reminiscent
of The Cure's Seventeen Seconds, and "Forwardness" brings the piano back to duel
with Reichian marimba patterns. "Place It" offers an orchestra of bass, from
plucked harmonic chimes to sliding, rolling patterns, weaving through electronic
melodies in miniature, with the trio's crackling hand claps running
interference, all while ghostly waves of synth strings coast and coat the song.
For anyone disappointed by the hermeticism of this album's predecessor, Hotel
Morgen, Speculation will pleasantly surprise. Its generous openness recalls To
Rococo Rot's signal album, 1999's The Amateur View, and like that record, its
melodic flourishes prove the group are no shirkers when it comes to pop music.
But I sense something else going on here, perhaps an intensification of
character that comes from meeting in such a focused setting after having spent a
longer time apart than usual (all three members, Stefan Schnieder and brothers
Ronald and Robert Lippok, are busy with extra-curricular activities), leading to
a re-tooling of their wonderfully "systems"-oriented approach to making music.
Most of all, Speculation reminds that there's always been something deeply human
about To Rococo Rot's music, and the way they bring "artificial worlds into
correspondence with nature"ùas they once described the presence of the tulips
that stretch across The Amateur View's front coverùis on fine form here. A very
welcome return.