Bleep

The techno genre known at its onset for sleek rigidity and machinelike precision a la the conveyor belts of Detroit putting together metal to build cars has, over time, become malleable and more fluid. The man/machine calculus has tipped even further towards humanity, and this is no small part to Rrose and their brand of explorative and challenging music that often tip toes the line between headphone listening and nightclub system destruction. There’s a playfulness at the heart of Rrose’s work too, an intrinsic desire to mess around within its taut foundations to find some hidden elasticity at the seams, not unlike the Dadaist art movement (and Marcel Duchamp’s “female alter-ego”) which the Rrose name is in tribute to.

While recent Rrose releases have clung more tightly to the experimental end of the spectrum, their latest full length Please Touch is something of a return to their techno output. Rather than settle into a singular groove, Rrose favours a healthy dose of ambience and propulsive energy as the guiding light here, creating a collection equally deft at moving bodies and soundtracking galleries.

Please Touch opens with the throat-clearing ‘Joy of the Worm’. Despite very little actually going on, the track’s chugging, rising synth line implies some sort of upward movement, creating tension that never really gets resolved. Things immediately shift however on the sinister ‘Rib Cage’. A floor-filling techno roller in that typically off-kilter Rrose manner, ‘Cage’ slams on the kick while the rest of the sound design oozes around within the holes punched in the air like a lava lamp. The closing ‘Turning Blue’ eschews the dancefloor entirely in favour of some haunting and discomforting drone, a well-earned final bow for a record that takes listeners through a lot of different planes.