I’VE been following the releases of German trio To Rococo Rot for almost ten years now, and during that time they have released six albums, the latest being this year’s Hotel Morgen. The three members are certainly busy guys. Their other musical commitments over the years have most notably included Tarwater, Kreidler and solo releases (Robert Lippok under his own name and Stefan Schneider as Mapstation). Their music is an understated mix of electronic sounds with some bass guitar and live drumming. I organised an email question and answer session with Robert Lippok to get a feel for what goes on behind the scenes in the world of To Rococo Rot.
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Igloo: If my memory serves me correctly, To Rococo Rot started as a band to play at a specific occasion. Was it an art gallery or some such?
Robert Lippok: Yes, the first show was held in a gallery in Berlin. The exhibition was called “To Rococo Rot” and our first record was a parallel project to that art show.
Igloo: What I find interesting about that point of origin is that there is a real feeling of that live interaction in your music. It doesn’t sound like you’re all sitting around tweaking sounds and editing moments for hours and hours. For me that makes it quite refreshing in comparison to a lot of contemporary music, particularly electronic music. Is maintaining some kind of live feeling important when recording?
Robert Lippok: With most of our tracks there is not much post-production. Not much cutting or editing beats. If a track is not working as we like it to work we don’t force it. We begin with something new. Through the experience of a lot of live performances and live radio sets we try to sometimes do a similar set up in the studio. I could imagine that we could record a CD in real time in the future.
Igloo: How do you find playing out compared to in the studio? Is live performance an important part of the band?
Robert Lippok: Our songs have pretty open structures as you can hear. The live version of a track differs very much from the recorded one. The track “Cars,” for example, has changed a lot through the years. The live situation is also a sort of laboratory for new tracks and when we play an electronic only set we improvise 100 percent. This is what we did last year with Curt Dahlke (Pyrolator) in a garden in Duesseldorf for something like four hours or at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, where we performed with other musicians near the river for 5 days.
Igloo: Between the three of you, you seem to have a lot of commitments. How often do you work on To Rococo Rot material? Is it a matter of doing a session here and there, having a break for a few months and then an intense week, or what?
Robert Lippok: It is a bit like that. We have no studio or rehearsal space. It is more a life of nomads. Stefan lives still in Duesseldorf and we meet only if we have concerts or when we work on new material. Apart from the production of Hotel Morgen we are pretty quick in producing. So we ask friends of us who have spaces (empty flats and so on) and put our gear there and start.
Igloo: Traditionally when performers are in a band (at least in rock and pop circles) they almost exclusively play with that one band, and if they do anything else this is considered a side-project. Obviously To Rococo Rot steps outside of this framework. How do you find that works? Do you think it makes what you do different from people who have one outlet for their music?
Robert Lippok: Tarwater, Ronald’s band, started before To Rococo Rot and Stefan worked in those days with Kreidler. I worked nearly my whole existence in the theatre. To Rococo Rot was one project out of others. We realised only after the success of the first record how important it was for us and then carried on working on a very straight forward theme.
Igloo: As To Rococo Rot the three of you have also collaborated with various other musicians, most notably with I-Sound on a track on The Amateur View and later the whole of Music Is A Hungry Ghost. I-Sound is someone (like D, as well) that I associated with making a lot of noise and sometimes being hard to listen to, so I was surprised to hear you were working together. How did that collaboration come about? How did you find it?
Robert Lippok: We love the stuff Craig (I-Sound) does and I don’t find it hard to listen to. When he DJs he just blasts the people away and there is a lot of noise but it also has a lot of energy and a lot of funk. We saw him in New York and after his gig we asked him if he would be interested in collaborating with us. His stuff is pretty dark but when he works with DJ Scut (the producer of the track of the decade “total destruction is the only solution”) there is a lot of beauty in it as well. We didn’t find it difficult to fit his sound in our music. Like in early techno, I like that melodies or hook lines come from more of a noise or atonal source. If we do some stuff together again I think he could also do some drum construction/deconstruction for us.
Igloo: Tell me about the latest album, Hotel Morgen. My vague memory of German classes has me wondering whether it refers to “tomorrow” or “morning”. More generally, where do the names of tracks come from? Do you ever start with a name and then write the music?
Robert Lippok: In this sense it would be “tomorrow”. No, the titles come after the production.
Igloo: Your sound has always had elements of dance music – I think every CD has at least one track that has a bit of a house feel – and Hotel Morgen seems to contain the most dancey moments I’ve heard from To Rococo Rot to date. Was this a conscious decision? Do you ever write with the intention of making something you would like to dance to?
Robert Lippok: As all three of us like to dance we have always been influenced by dance music, but it has limits which we didn’t find useful for us. You need a special tempo to fit in to other tracks, the kick drum needs special frequencies, and so on. We like to use the more thinking structures. Ronald and me did some acid party in ’88 in East Berlin where people danced from the first to the last track and I think its time to make something like that again. Lets see.
Igloo: Some of the tracks on Hotel Morgen contain sounds and moments that are reminiscent of earlier recordings. I’m thinking particularly of the tracks “Tal” and “Feld”, which almost sound to me like they could both be an assemblage of sounds from tracks on The Amateur View. When you’re writing, how much do you consider maintaining consistency with past material (or breaking away from it)?
Robert Lippok: Like the Icelandic band Múm we often use the same equipment. In fact they’ve got one of our all time favourite instruments, the Yamaha VSS 30 sampler, too. Well, Fat Boy Slim has it as well. So through our gear and through our way of production the tracks sometimes have a strong relation to each other. Almost as if they are what we call a doppelstern [a binary star], oscillating around the same centre. It’s true I think Hotel Morgen is closer to The Amateur View than the last album was. With To Rococo Rot I like the idea that there is no real development in the music. I know in our time everything has to develop and develop quick. You could say that that we are making a mistake but I feel that our music is close to traditional music or folk music. Seen from that side the frequency of the sine-wave of our moves is just a bit lower than with other people or maybe our time line is not as straight in one direction.
Igloo: Are you touring on the back of the new album? What are your future plans, as a group and otherwise?
Robert Lippok: We started to do some shows in April. We did a little tour with Stereolab which turned to be very nice. In June we will be at SONAR, finally. There are some festivals in the summer and the big touring starts in September and will bring us around the globe – South America, USA, Japan… Also there will be a new Tarwater record next year. I am working with Barbara Morgenstern on a full length album, Stefan will do some Mapstation stuff and maybe Ronald and I will do stage design for a baroque opera in 2006. So lots of things will happen.
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Hotel Morgen is out now on Domino Records.
