MICHAEL ROTHER
Solo II
FSeven-disc retrospective set including brand new album.
ollowing on from 2019’s Solo box, this seven-CD set continues a comprehensive retrospective of the man whose imprint upon electronic music through early Kraftwerk, Neu!, Harmonia, and with Brian Eno is indelible. Gathering Rother’s 80s and 90s titles including Lust, Süssherz Und Tiefenschärfe, Traumreisen, Esperanza and Remember (The Great Adventure) from 2004, his fascination with sleeker textures and a desire to inhabit a poppier milieu within his music is clearly laid out.
What you hear is what you get with Rother, a composer and performer whose love affair with melody makes his music remarkably accessible. His cyclical motifs pitched into orbit, then endlessly cascading in slow motion down into spongy beats, are alluring and hypnotic. Immediate and likable, if at times not always lapel-grabbing, these albums shimmer with a naïve charm and personable warmth.
The big draw here comes with a new album, Dreaming, recorded as Germany went into lockdown. Cultural historians of the future looking back to the second decade of the 21st century will have their work cut out when assessing the art that was created in the midst of a pandemic. Rother’s response is a confection of sultry beats and hypnotic languor, acid guitar etching deep into his keyboard’s glassy surfaces.
The effect is not unlike the quixotic faux 50s pop numbers that haunted David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a chimerical world where things aren’t quite what they appear to be, with the possibility that beneath those seemingly sweet, simplistic veneer, darker, more complex instincts are stirring. A female singer torpidly intones ‘Bitter tang of loneliness’ (Bitter Tang) or on Fierce Wind Blowing, ‘Nothing matters and everyone else is crazy’ suggesting an edgy dislocation and emotional distance is infecting this otherwise upbeat and optimistic-sounding world. With another disc entitled Bonus Tracks, there are no radical shifts in direction but rather the continuing expression of someone with nothing to prove.