TO ROCOCO ROT

Veiculo

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Boomkat Product Review:

Expanded edition of one of our favourite albums of all time, 'Veiculo', the second album from To Rococo Rot, 1997. It stands up as one of the pivotal records of the era, bridging between prevailing Chicago Post Rock currents and the concentric electronics produced by Move D at around the same time, also preempting the kind of fractured minimalism that would emerge via SND about a year later. Supremely easy on the ear, foundational music for the ages - yup, consider it core curriculum.

A trio of Stefan Schneider and brothers Ronald and Robert Lippok, To Rococo Rot managed to do something astonishing in the late-'90s, figuring out a fusion of experimental electronic music and down-swung rock that even decades later sounds singular and startlingly symmetrical. It's hardly surprising that they were based in Berlin, where they were able to soak up both the city's burgeoning club culture and its long history of punk-y experimentation, curving angular instrumental experiments around filigree electronic pulses. Needless to say, 'Veiculo' is an album that grabbed us by the throat when we first heard it, and it's rarely been far from the turntable ever since - there aren't many other records from this period that sound quite so ageless.

The Lippoks had been working together in "freakwave" outfit Ornament & Verbrechen when they were tapped to provide a one-off record for a local exhibition. They roped in Schneider, who was then playing bass with popular kraut-pop outfit Kreidler, and recorded a tight, bass-heavy suite of experiments that they pressed to picture disc in 1995 - To Rococo Rot were born. 'Veiculo' emerged two years later, and fully maps out a stylistic concept they'd continuously challenge over a sequence of very different albums. It's remarkably beautiful, but exceptionally rigorous; like the cover - a repeating sequence of dots and lines - there's an order to the music that allows the trio to experiment in the margins. Just take a peep at the opener 'Micromanaged', that sounds almost as stark as SND's 'Stdio'-era gear, but feathered on the edges, letting warm sunlight melt some of the ice.

Elsewhere, the influence of post-rock is far more identifiable: Schneider's clean, repeating bass phrases don't sound too far removed from Tortoise's levitational riffs, and Ronald Lippok's drums are bewilderingly clever, a mash-up of Can's kinetic thumps and Talk Talk's airy, jazz-inspired brushes that's welded together by Robert's forward-thinking electronic treatments. This is never more evident than on the iconic 'Mit dir in der Gegend' - we'd wager the single track we probably rinsed the most in the late 90's - where the trio tangle upper-register bass plucks with rhythmically shifting electronic pads, euphoric organ drones and pattering drums. Pull the track apart and it's as hallucinogenic as any of Warp's '90s back-room gear, but by using instruments, To Rococo Rot fill in the gaps and link up the timeline. If Bark Psychosis's 'Scum' was the anti-rock record, 'Veiculo' is rock's inverse imprint, with its bombast and scrappiness repurposed to slot into a post-techno timeline.

There's even an appearance from Berlin legend Move D, who co-produces and mixes the undulating aside 'Lips', and reworks the album's closer 'Lift' - the closest the trio get to approximating humid Chicago house, with staccato organ stabs and a cheeky, off-key bassline. There's just so much in here that joins the dots between various sounds that would spider off into their own genres in the following years, but more than that, it's just one of the most enjoyable albums of that era - and ours.

MP3 Release (21)