to rococo rotʼs records on City Slang, “veiculo“ (1997), “the amateur view“ (1999) and “music is a hungry ghost“ (2001) will be released since a long time again. Each album will be rereleased as a remastered album with bonus tracks. Linernotes: To Rococo Rot, »The Amateur View« (City Slang, 1999/2012) There is a paradoxical quality to music as cultural memory. It can produce singular experiences , unrepeatable by their very nature, that nonetheless can be kept for posterity. In the best of these moments, it is in the position to take historically bound phenomena and attunements, whose connections might not have been recognizable, and place them into a constellation that brings out something new. If such music deserves to be called timeless, it is not because it rises above the conditions which allowed it to emerge, but because it provides duration to the moment, the singular, in all its fleetingness and instability. What had previously been floating in the air suddenly receives artistic expressionbecomes available to a community as style. Anyone who listens today, thirteen years after its release, to “The Amateur View,” the third album by To Rococo Rot, will have an experience much like tasting Proust’s cookie. Every sound releases memories of a transitional period, when cultural and political lines of demarcation were about to be surmounted on quite different terrains. The contours of the time in which we live today had just started to surface. Many people who were living in Berlin during the mid to late ‘90s - or spent a lot of time there - sensed this. Perhaps the reason for the success of this work is that the music confirmed their feeling of having experiences that they could already look back on as history, even while they were happening. The eleven tracks on this long-playing record are nostalgia for the present in the purest and best sense of the word. In terms of music, “The Amateur View” is a reaction to developments that came from two different areas. After the comet-like rise and tragic end of Kurt Cobain and his group Nirvana, the world of independently produced guitar music had fallen into disarray. Rock’n’Roll, both as a formal language and as a worldview, seemed used up and could increasingly be described as a method of forming bourgeois subjects tuned to melancholy, a method which operates – sometimes openly, other times covertly – on the principle of misogyny. This paradigm was altered by formations like Tortoise, Stereolab, or Gastr del Sol. They abandoned rock music’s deeply conventional politics of stirring emotions and opened their repertoire of expression to the stylistic achievements of the musical avant-gardes of the ‘60s and ‘70s. On the other side of the spectrum, techno, which appeared at the end of the ‘80s and was in direct competition with the aesthetics of rock, seemed to have achieved its artistic and commercial zenith. Offshoots of the downturn that followed could already be seen. The development of the “Love Parade” from a noise demo to a popular festival of the newly reunified Germany prompted musically advanced artists to set themselves apart from the mainstream. In the wake of ambient music, founded by artists like Eric Satie or Brian Eno and revived in the chill-out zones of club culture, the functional beat was overcome as the means of shaping and organizing the movements of music and bodies. Labels such as Mille Plateaux or Rephlex, and even international stars such as Aphex Twin or Wolfgang Voigt, just to pick up two random examples, turned to experimental electronic music and worked out its history, which reached back deep into the 20th century. From there it was just a short step into the domain of the art academies, where students were increasingly working with sound and installation. These strains marked musical events everywhere in the western world, in Great Britain, on the European continent, and soon in the United States as well. Nowhere did they find more fertile ground than in Berlin, where a state of exception had become established since the fall of the Wall. This was the time when the cornerstone was laid in the myth of the poor but creative city, which today draws tourists in droves, increasingly forcing out the protagonists of the supposed “first hours.” Starting in the mid-‘90s, the streets in the former East German neighborhoods of Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain were redeveloped. Self-chosen, autonomous project spaces were already being transformed into galleries operating under the conditions of the market. This was still a time when a mood of euphoria and a free spirit reigned. For a long time, spurred on by the energies of steadily arriving cultural producers from the entire world, Berlin continued to develop into an Eldorado of self-realizers, a site of longing, a place where any lifestyle could claim to be an experiment to be taken as a role model. The number of buildings that became available with re-unification and had lost their previous function over the course of history, was simply too huge to be grappled with. They stood open for almost any form of cultural usage. The origins of To Rococo Rot go back to the year 1995. Yvonne Harder was running the Salon Mutzek, which later became the Panasonic, a legendary (and now long closed) club in Invalidenstraße, a place where many of the key figures from the worlds of the visual arts and music met and experimented with electronic aspects of living. Harder had invited Robert Lippok to jump in as DJ after a concert by Kreidler. The quartet had been founded a year before by Stefan Schneider, master student in Bernd Becher’s photography class at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, along with Detlef Weinrich, Andreas Reihse, and Thomas Klein. Kreidler were among the first and most advanced protagonists of a genre that had not yet been clearly defined. They merged the developments in the formerly guitar-based “independent” music and in electronica, which had surfaced after the heyday of techno. The result crystallized into a hybrid of post-rock and computer-based minimalism. It would soon go under the general name of “indietronics.” Stefan Schneider and Robert Lippok got to talking and decided to make music together as soon as the opportunity arose. The moment came when Robert Lippok, along with his older brother Ronald, both of whom had been students at the Art Academy Berlin-Weißensee, took part in planning an exhibition at Galerie Weißer Elefant, then located in Chaußeestrasse. On the lookout for a title for the collective project, they came across the palindrome “To Rococo Rot,” a sequence of letters that reads the same backwards and forwards. A picture disc was meant to appear along with the exhibition. Stefan Schneider was invited to take part in the production. Ronald Lippok first met him in the rehearsal space. Two days later the music was recorded. A month later the vinyl disc was already in record stores. It appeared under Kitty-Yo, a label that was providing a platform for the music coming out of Berlin at the time, and which turned it into an internationally established brand name. The barely restrained furor of the music recorded in these sessions from 1996 gives one a sense of what different artistic impulses must have been interacting. For one, there was Stefan Schneider, a bassist who came from the Rhine region. His playing clearly followed the traces of modernity, and operated within the cultural orientations of the west. He made only sparse use of his instrument and shaped the music by placing profound accents that held the disparate elements together as much as possible. Ronald and Robert Lippok, the two sons of an explosives specialist and construction engineer from Berlin-Mitte, brought along the musical baggage which they had been developing since 1983 in Ornament & Verbrechen. This artist’s group had been closely associated with the Ostpunk movement. Their roots lie in the industrial and Goth music of the post-punk era, both both musical aesthetics with a genuinely anti-modern tilt. When the GDR still existed, we mustn’t forget, the recourse to the shock tactics of the historical avant-gardes, much like the use of cultural techniques in general that stand in a tradition aimed against Enlightenment values, was part of a strategy for speaking figuratively, of saying one thing and meaning something else, in a way that was difficult for the authorities to decipher. It was always conceived of as an aesthetic opposition to a dictatorship that considered itself to be on the side of the working class and the idea of historical progress – even as it confined and monitored its own people. The three musicians continued the project To Rococo Rot with the same line-up, releasing a second album, “Veiculo,” a year later, in 1997, this time with the independent label City Slang. Particularly for Ronald and Robert Lippok, this must have been a decision of considerable importance. It marked a renunciation of the principle at work in Ornament & Verbrechen, of remaining open to new members joining and to all forms of cultural articulation, from performance to poetry reading to film screenings. There was a refusal to develop a clearly identifiable artistic language. At the time, they also rejected using the then necessary “playing permit” for musicians, the so-called “Pappe” [“cardboard”] issued by the authorities. Therefore, the concerts took place in a semi-legal framework. The few recordings that remain did not come out on the state label Amiga, but were distributed on cassettes copied by hand, a process that is wonderfully documented by Alexander Pehlemann and Ronald Galenza in the volume “Spannung, Leistung, Widerstand” (Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin, 2006). Seen from this perspective, the founding years of To Rococo Rot are also the history of two artists who were trying out how it felt to produce within the rules of a music economy that suddenly had become available to them after re-unification. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that three musicians from two previously separate countries – in the middle of a historical process that did not accomplish the consolidation of the GDR and the FRG into a single state with a new constitution, but phased out the East according to the demands of the West – grappled with an aesthetic proposal, both micropolitically and in an exemplary way, to which at least they, with their different cultural imprints, could equally relate. If the two first albums – the tumultuous debut and “Veiculo,” its distinctly more domesticated and technoid successor – still largely gave off the character of a live session, Stefan Scheider and the brothers Lippok took more time to prepare for the work on “The Amateur View.” The pieces did not initially emerge spontaneously in the studio. Before they went into final production under the direction of the producers Tobias Levin and Bo Kondren, audio tapes were exchanged between Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg and reworked, until the album finally took its definitive shape. This may be one reason why the eleven pieces are more strictly composed. There are, as always, highly disparate elements. But they were no longer allowed to roam freely within an improvised structure. The musical motifs are clearly distinguished from one another, divided among different and therefore also shorter pieces, thus given the opportunity of taking on a form in their own right. The musical events often develop around sounds from an obscure source. They are left as they are and set up as foreign bodies within a structure that is heterogeneous to them – perhaps an echo of the working methods of Ornament & Verbrechen, where Ronald and Robert Lippok were constantly producing indecipherable sounds, made from existing instruments and everyday objects introduced at random. Manifest stylistic borrowings from industrial music, such as can be heard on the unnamed debut album, had disappeared from the music. But they lingered on in sublimated form in the background of the modernist, sometimes almost streamlined sound surface as a gloomy-romantic impression. That gave the tracks a seductive depth. It is pleasantly distinguished from many of the all too academic albums to come, which were released at the time between the poles of “post-rock” and “electronica.” As if they were the protocol of a single day of life, from one sunrise to the next, the pieces add up to a flow of sketchily formulated emotions. Beginning with the mysteriously shimmering opening number, “I Am In The World With You,” continuing with the hymn-like “Telema,” a song without words that Saint Etienne and Stereolab never wrote, through apocalyptically veiled sound poems like “This Sandy Piece” or “Tomorrow” in the middle section, and on to the utopian sentiments in the finale, “Das Blau und Der Morgen” [“The Blue And The Morning”], borrowing on a remote South Seas melody. This album conceives music as the soundtrack for a daily life that can only be grasped as it comes into being. “As the day begins, the electricity comes on, people wake up, get up, talk, go on their way,” we read in a text published on the inside cover, obviously written by the group itself. “The use of colors, the passing of time, writing something down without being an author.” To Rococo Rot, as the album’s title suggests, approached life and music from the point of the view of an amateur, a stranger, who doesn’t really know how things work, what he’s trying to do; of someone who still has a lot to learn, but also a lot to give to those, the professionals, who think they already know what they’re doing: the ability to unlearn the routine and its rituals. For the world of indie rock To Rococo Rot and other bands of their generation opened up decentered politics of attentiveness, a process-oriented way of working that is not fixed on the event, the climax or the stage as a center of attention. Their artistic approach looks for commonalities and founds networks instead of aiming for confrontation. As for the area of electronic music, which was already long familiar with structures and rhizomatic methods of perception, they in turn helped to establish the format of the club concert. The endlessly overflowing night of dancing now often began with an event, which clearly demarcated in time from the following, rather loosely organized kinds of activities – a principle that helped to structure a long evening of partying and which is still practiced in institutions like Berghain to great success. After 1999, many people also soon enjoyed the mode of shaping everyday life motivated by bands such as To Rococo Rot. “The Amateur View” positively became an accessory for the occasional table. This music could be heard in the background all over, in close quarters between the four walls of home, in specialized bookstores featuring art theory and architecture, and of course in discrete lounges, where young people in training jackets and emblematic shoulder bags created a lifestyle out of being observed opening up the lid of their laptops, decorated with an optimistically illuminated apple, and consuming a hot beverage with frothy milk. Looking back, it might be possible to see To Rococo Rot, especially with a record like “The Amateur View”, as having created the acoustic wallpaper for a level of style in gentrified urban spaces. It wouldn’t be the first time that the intentions of visionary art were transformed, behind its own back, into the stimulus for a social practice now tainted with enemy images. What remains is the dignity and seriousness of a music that opened up spaces of possibility. Listening to the music, you can hear in your memory what might have been, had the story taken a different course. This makes it into one of the true classics that were produced in Berlin at the turn of the last decade: aloof, but always facing life, riding along the pulse of time as it trickles by. Christoph Gurk, Berlin, August 2012