In the beginning, Rrose made techno. Unusual techno, perhaps—heady, psychedelic, convoluted—but techno nonetheless. It maintained the genre’s recognizable form, based on four-on-the-floor beats and boom-tick cadences. It drew its minimalist aesthetic from the early-’90s sounds of artists like Robert Hood and Richie Hawtin, and it was in conversation with fellow travelers along the genre’s grayscale fringes—contemporaries like Sandwell District, Donato Dozzy, and Kangding Ray.
Rrose—American-born, London-based artist Seth Horvitz, who borrowed the alias from Marcel Duchamp’s femme alter ego—has simultaneously moonlighted in more avant-garde sounds. They collaborated with modular-synth pioneer and free improviser Bob Ostertag and recorded a 1971 composition by percussionist James Tenney. Rrose’s debut solo album, 2020’s Hymn to Moisture, struck a balance between their opposing influences, alternating between chugging rhythmic workouts and buzzing expanses of pure drone.
On their new album Please Touch, Rrose continues to move between sounds that flicker and sounds that throb, wreathing shuddering electronic pulses in opalescent waveshaping. But the proportions have shifted. Where Hymn to Moisture was neatly split between club tracks and ambient pieces, on Please Touch, the elements have fused, and it’s more difficult to discern one mode from the other. It’s all one glistening, churning morass, a cascading chain of vibrations that transcends electronic music’s conventional templates.
Rhythm and drone are inextricable in the opening “Joy of the Worm,” in which a nervous gamelan thrum taps away over low-end swells. There’s something almost rotor-like about the chopping percussion, suggesting a helicopter hovering motionless over a fetid swamp: The drums are in constant motion, yet the whole thing stays almost still, but for the rolling waves of bass. Other tracks attempt similar blends of motion and stasis. “Pleasure Vessels” is dub techno in the tradition of Basic Channel or the Chain Reaction label, just with all the beats blotted out; bursts of synth pile up over almost inaudibly burbling bass, suggesting overlapping layers of translucent materials, like onion skin or tulle.
There are a few purely beatless tracks, like “Disappeared” and the closing “Turning Blue,” in which microtonal harmonies and extraordinarily patient mixing yield immersive psychoacoustic effects in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros or Éliane Radigue. And on a few cuts, the balance tips back toward proper beats. Yet Rrose’s work is so rhythmically and timbrally complex that it bears little in common with standard contemporary dance music. “Rib Cage” begins with a machine-like hum and gradually spreads a flowing array of pulses and pings across the spectrum, from the deepest sub-bass to the prickliest high end. Superimposing insect chatter on turbine groan, it’s part engine room, part rainforest.
