Rrose has sent heads both bobbing and thinking (hard) with a series of impeccable EPs and 12-inch releases over the last five or so years, crafting a strain of dense electronic dance music weighted with jittering synth noise and bone-shaking drum patterns in the house and electro traditions. Her new LP on Further Records quietly slithers away from the dancefloor and sets up shop in the shell of an abandoned trolley. The album does not present a single instance of conventional harmony or rhythm. On the vast spectrum of musical experience, it falls closer to the hallucinatory long-form percussion performances of Charlemagne Palestine or Z’ev. It is performed on a single 32-inch gong.
“Having Never Written a Note for Percussion” is a piece of music composed by the American minimalist James Tenney in 1971. It instructs the performer to sketch a long-form arch of activity on one percussion instrument, minutely building in volume and intensity to a halfway point and sinking back into silence before the conclusion. It is an exercise in discipline, consistency, and attention to detail. On the LP of the same name, Rrose performs this piece twice: once in a studio setting, and once live at Dupont Underground in Washington, DC. Behind the audible beatings of mallets on the gong, the physical space catches spectral remnants of echo and shimmering metal. In the live version, machines and people step into the stereo spread, as the gong spreads its slow tendrils across the ground. The studio version catches an isolated feed of the gong, cresting in high fidelity to a bass-heavy climax. In the right listening environment (i.e., silence), both versions have the capacity to set listeners off into a meditation at the center of a blackened expanse of infinite reverb.
• Rrose: http://rrose.ro
• Further Records: http://furtherrecords.org
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