Rope Hotel (Geist CD/LP 002 – 1998)
Christopher_Jion on discogs.com
... this is some of the most amazing, beautiful and deep music I’ve ever heard in my life. I can’t put into words the atmosphere and mood this album puts out. it feels like music you’d hear in a beautiful, surreal, calm dream… and then you’d wake up unable to explain it.
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It’s no fun to compute (Geist CD/LP 007 – 1999UK/2000US)
Antron S. Meister on freq.org.co.uk
Another one of the seeming legion of classically-trained musicians who got fed up and went off in search of the joys of electronic noise and fragmented soundscapes, Rope’s Berlin-based originator Jayrope has assembled a selection of live studio recordings made with his core collaborators over a year or so, and thoroughly dismantled them until they almost groan with the strain. It’s No Fun To Compute opens with a burst of cut ups where vocal lines, percussion, electronics, samples and who knows what are skipped around with over a pulsing bass tone, and continues from there on in to bounce tracks off each other and through a varispeed bundle of effects; then it really starts to get peculiar…
Rattly percussion and some kind of Funk sensibility make for a stop-start album with an organic feel, song structures struggling among the frantic loops and slips of tape rewinds; it’s sometimes Jazz maybe, but not as usually expected, somewhat in the way that Laika play the Blues – sideways, technologically, awakwardly, but taken to the nth degree of wobblyness. Or Funk with hiccups, hyperspeed Lo-Fi Techno style. What this is all attempting to describe is the miamsic feeling the music evokes, as a regurgitated riff becomes washed out into a thudding beat which evolves into swarming flanger trails. An album of head-messing reliance on the reverb unit and mixed as if to try every combination of slider and punch-out on the desk, It’s No Fun… (or INF2C as Rope shorten the title) sometimes slaps the face of Electronica quite rudely before going off into its own peculiar sung tangents. These include the affecting query “If we stood by the river/...Would you push me in” on “If”, which resembles the sinister Pop Throbbing Gristle explored on Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, or the weird burbling tale “Dog In Southern New Mexico” where Jayrope’s wandering spoken vocals about seeing horses die in the sun and sand complement a shifting rhythm section and some dissonant percussion. Very odd.
There is some humour and melody among the single-minded eccentricity; “You’re Soooo Lame” mixes up a synthesized vocal with an ultra-minimal thud-beat until it keels over into a miniature curve of effects, and “Machine AC” is nearly acoustic, apart from some treated vocals, in a vaguely Country kind of way, harmonica and all. The frenetic start contrasts with more spasmodically mellow pieces like “Rope Theme” or “Desert Dream” which lead the record gradually towards a twitchy, downbeat conclusion of spluttering electronic noises and birdsong. Rope seem to have taken every kind of motif they find attractive, and bashed them around into whatever works, and largely it comes off well. Unsettling at times, It’s No Fun To Compute almost embodies entropic dissolution as it crashes from the energy of the first half into a slow decay at the end. And whatever else, its demand for attention is refreshing, and one which is difficult to ignore.