to rococo rot: john peel bbc saessions 97-99

Without a doubt, To Rococo Rot are an exception within the German music landscape. From 1995 until they broke up in 2014, the group around Robert Lippok, Ronald Lippok, and Stefan Schneider researched a unique sound between electronic music, ambient, post-melancholy, and the further development of a new, free music like krautrock. The trio was invited three times by John Peel to record radio sessions in the BBC studios. Bureau B make the recordings from these three sessions from the years 1997 and 1999 available on record for the first time, which, in addition to the live versions of selected album tracks, also contains exclusive, unreleased songs. "... Kreidler originated in the west, Ornament & Verbrechen in the east. Robert Lippok describes the moment when things did a 180: 'When we first started releasing records it was almost a shock to hear our own music on the radio.' You walk through an invisible wall. You cause a membrane to pulsate. And finally in 1995, To Rococo Rot was the band whose music, in a kind of aesthetic feedback loop, also made a certain John Peel at the BBC and Daniel Miller at Mute Records sit up and take notice: 'It was something new, something that sounded like it could only be done in Germany; and, as I discovered later, could only be done by guys who were born in the east of Germany in the days before the wall came down.' And so, the three To Rococo Rot sessions united here with their to some extent exclusive Peel tracks ('Glück', 'Esther', 'Glass'), some recorded under intense time pressure, are testimonies to the intimate connection of three German musicians with the whole world, with pop, with the happiness that one possesses and that one shares. Pop without its means of production is inconceivable. And even in times when digital is king, we should consider ourselves lucky that this analog reality of sound, like radio waves, continues to pulsate through us." --Karl Bruckmaier