Robert Lippok
Falling Into Komeit
(Monika Enterprise)
After working with Komeit on a series of remixes of their album Falling Into Place, Robert Lippok (of To Rococo Rot) just decided to keep going. The result is this 10 track musical love-letter of sorts to that original disc. It's been reworked and tweaked here and there and given a new and different life, but still retains much of the minimal pop foundations that the orignal had.
The release opens with "I Can Tell" and the soft vocals of Julie Kliemann are kept alongside soft synth melodies that bounce back and forth softly while a quiet rhythm propels everything along before the whole thing sifts into a subtle loop that brings things to a close. "Holler" is perhaps the best track on the disc, taking the already beautiful acoustic guitar melody and manipulating it just slightly in places to give the song a touch more life. The track builds in minor steps, eventually reaching a point near the end where low-end blips and static slowly overtake everything.
As is evident in his work with To Rococo Rot, Lippok is a master of small changes that have a larger effect than one would think. Even when things aren't as subtle (as on the pulsing programmed beatwork of "Parade"), it's the gentle changes in the background that make all the difference. In a couple places, the album definitely gets to be more outright pop (especially on the punchy beats and more overt vocals of "Rearrange"), but Lippok still manages to keep things fairly in check, never letting them slip too into a mainstream feel.
It's definitely on the quieter tracks that the work of Lippok stands out the most (perhaps because it's closer to his hyper-subtle solo work on Raster Noton), though. The closer of "Three Hours" takes a guitar loop and repeats it hypnotically while the vocals of Kliemann are filtered into just another texture while other soft layers of noise and lingering single piano notes. When listening to tracks like it and others, part of me wonders what would have been had Lippok took things to an even further end of reworking, but Falling Into Komeit is still quite nice as it stands.
Rating: 7.25
