To Rococo Rot - ABC123 Album Review

To Rococo Rot
ABC123
Album Sampler

Having been left a little unsatisfied by this sketchy, very brief CD (eight tracks in under 20 minutes) from well-established Berlin types, I was pleased to discover that it's a taster for a full-length album next year. A bit odd, that. Would you get a book reviewer to give you their thoughts on a few lines culled from each chapter, from which the plot is indistinct and the characters barely hinted at? Probably not, but that's what writing about this CD feels like - little tastes of something a lot bigger.

I'd like the record to state that it's all very electronic. 'freitag' has a Teutonic son-of-Kraftwerk funkiness, the drum machine on 'lvx 4' sounds very motorik-heartbeat promising, 'post reprise' doesn't do much but the noise in the background like someone shaking a jar of pennies is good, 'verscheiden' has an inhuman throb to it, 'abc' sounds like a few machines having a chat, 'zigue zague' has a nice lilt to it, 'enigma' sounds a bit by numbers, and 'h5' sounds like David Sylvian tuning every single one of his enormous collection of cymbals.

Where these ideas go, how they develop? Anybody's guess.

Jon Watson