Were I a game designer (I’m not), seeking out a looming, background-thickening, intent-laden pulse to propel significant scenes (think, I don’t know, the more post-industrial bits of ‘Max Payne’) forward, the new To Rococo Rot record would be a cause for major celebration. Pitched some place between post-rock purpose and krautrock starkness, motifs and themes under-explored and then self-consciously forgotten about, tracks equipped with little resembling either an end or a beginning, it latches onto the underground and walled-off gardens of one’s music-brain, leaving the front-space clear for shotgun-firing and bullet-time ducking.
Which makes for a slightly detached, glassy, humourless – okay, yes, German – listening experience. Opener ‘Away’ is an eerily precise bassline taunt. A remarkably linear path is then forged through minimalist shamble (‘Seele’), kid with laptop covering Philip Glass glocken-rave (‘Forwardness’) and something that I’d almost certainly use to soundtrack my imaginary and expensive Japanese Sake bar (‘Working Against Time’) – each track studded with occasional snap- or crackle-flourishes of Robert Lippock’s insanely understated electronic imagination. Flourishes which eventually force the other brother Lippock, Ronald, and Stefan Schneider’s frighteningly tight drum and bass backbone out of the picture almost entirely, for a broken and ambient close, featuring Faust’s organist.
It’s crisply effective – especially considering the entire record is, essentially, a live recording: truly, To Rococo Rot are the robots, beep beep beep beep, icily impressive. Weirdly, considering it’s the band’s eighth or ninth record, released on Domino, my iTunes didn’t recognise ‘Speculation’, and regurgitated it way down at the screen-bottom next to !!!. Even more weirdly, and joke-names aside, the juxtaposition of these two utterly different artists actually helped make sense of both for me: !!! are the soundtrack to the brain of the murderer who nobody thinks is a murderer because he likes to dance. ‘Speculation’ is the soundtrack to the brain of the murderer who nobody thinks is a murderer because he wears beautiful suits.
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