to rococo rotʼs records on City Slang, “veiculo“ (1997), “the amateur view“ (1999) and “music is a hungry ghost“ (2001) will be released since a long time again. Each album will be rereleased as a remastered album with bonus tracks. linernotes. to rococo rot. veiculo. 1997/2012. Sabine Gietzelt. München. August 2012 What does ‘Gegend’ (area) look like? How can you musically approximate this already vague term for a part of a landscape or a city? Generations of musicians have taken up the question of how places can be described musically, of what they feel like acoustically. With ‚veiculo‘, to rococo rot take a stroll in a landscape and architectural space that hasn’t yet been built up, letting each one merge with the other. Thankfully, this attempt didn’t result in any kind of ambient carpet of sound. And all-too technoid concrete samples, which have their own connotations, were also excluded. The sound on ‚veiculo‘, is dry, the structures are clear, the pieces reduced, the samples freed from any information, space opens up. Fifteen years ago, when ‚veiculo‘ was initially released, a process of rethinking was going on. The separation between band and DJ, between song and track, between analogue and digital had given way to cooperation between them. In ‚veiculo‘, instruments were experimented with, and the different values of recording, mixing, and mastering gave way to an idea that ,Everything is important!‘. So from the very beginning, the music was about leaving things out. Empty spaces were used as bridges instead of bogging down the open intervals with sound. Many people today, after an overdose of minimal techno, have unlearned how to cherish the reduced in music. ‚veiculo‘, however, and despite all the reduction, is a record that propels forward with subtly dynamic pieces, which is also due to the empty spaces. The pauses are not treated as gaps in the construction that destroy the overall view, but as sites with their own right to exist. Open spaces where anything is possible: for functional use, for wild mental gymnastics, or even for the sweetness of doing nothing at all in an undefined, if also limited space. Music to listen to casually, to sink into, and also to dream into romantically. to rococo rot’s pieces on ‚veiculo‘ assume the classic pop format, coming to an end (usually) after only three or four minutes, although one can easily imagine them going on for another ten minutes. They are songs rather than tracks, even if they manage without any words, and they don’t shy away from the fascination of electronically generated sounds. Parts of ‚veiculo‘ are reminiscent of dub, a genre of music in which reduction has long been at home. to rococo rot let their samples and loops branch out into ever more complex sounds, which nonetheless come to an end instead of perishing, frayed and nebulous, into nothingness. And even Krautrock, a genre that was already somewhat hackneyed at the time, turns up at just the right spot in to rococo rot. Fifteen years ago, there weren’t very many other bands as far along as to rococo rot. SG