Rope started in 1996
...as a folk band of jayrope, Malcom Arison, Rob Cummings and Micha Lenke. They played acoustic songs jayrope had written in Austin, Texas in winter 94/95.
~
Soon they changed into an early post rock band, influenced by Latin Playboys’ debut album & early DHR tracks – and while jayrope engineered for Atari Teenage Riot’s “Future of War”.
Rope started looping themselves completely and played on top of it again, and they got rid of all vocals. Later this mix got described as “the constant rain of an unreleased Blade Runner type soundtrack”, a “slap in the face of electronica”.
Alec Empire was soon to offer a release on Geist Rec., and shortly jayrope delivered Rope’s debut album Rope Hotel, an intense work of 7 dubbed, overcompressed, ambient, electro-acoustic psychedelia works, released in 1998. Andrew Weatherall was said to spin Rope on vinyl at the time.
~ ~
Then Rob Cummings, Nico Lippolis, Marko Timlin (all on drums) and Jiddish singer Nives Kramberger on additional vocals got to be contributors for the 2nd album. It featured vocals again and was released in 1999(UK)/2000(US) under the name It’s no fun to compute. jayrope was obiovusly not getting Kraftwerk’s joke.
Logically the album sounded totally fucked up, even if that was only caused by bad soundcards & too many audio plugins in the signal chain.
Many nerds today still have the problem of a lack of reality (perception), a ‘digitally inherent’ one we guess.
Rope kind of fell apart then, in 2001.
A lack of infrastructure (management/booking), no interest from the label (Rope, like many other DHR & Geist acts were obviously only signed to make the DHR core look like a family) and jayrope’s newly gained fathership made further Rope action impossible for a while. The baby’s face is on the cover of INF2C. And more importnt: Rope turned out to be not compatible to pop music. Since DHR was pop: Wrong label.
Both released albums, nevertheless, got a lot of praise from fellow musicians, like Rechenzentrum, Electronicat, and also from magazines like ‘the Wire’ and the German ‘Spex’. A tiny but hardcore fan crew loved those obsessed concerts, which were never the same.
~ ~ ~
Jayrope toured a bit solo then and recorded much simpler trackls for a 3rd Rope album on his own, before it was all layed aside, in favor of many new music enterprises (Touchdonttouch / Television Workshop / Girls United / Hardman Bros / Kimmo Elomaa / The Sighs).
In April 2006 jayrope got to know Antonioni Maiof during a recording session for the Sighs. at Bristol’s Cube cinema. It’s been great to work together, and so jayrope got infected with Anton Maiof’s brilliantly noisy solo works by the name of My Ambulance is on Fire.
Not much later the two started doing Rope again.