Welcome to the palindrome.
Specifically To Rococo Rot, the Berlin-based trio whose texturally meticulous music draws on techno, dub, ambient and electronic minimalism, a group whose geographical remove from Glasgow - 750 miles, give or take - is in inverse proportion to their spiritual proximity to the city and its satellites. Permutations of the band's line-up of Stefan Schneider and brothers Robert and Ronald Lippok have a long history of collaborating with Glasgow dreamers The Pastels and Falkirk's Bill Wells, and a week tomorrow they will cement further what Schneider assures me is a unique relationship when they play Platform, the Easterhouse arts venue doing its level best to inject a dose of imagination into an increasingly pedestrian live music scene.
Supporting To Rococo Rot at one of only two British dates on their European tour to promote their latest album - the breezy, bewitching Instrument - will be the National Jazz Trio of Scotland, the mischievously titled venture - neither jazz nor a trio - led by the unclassifiable Wells. Speaking from Hamburg, where in tandem with Sven Kacirek he is mixing a record of field recordings of folk music from Kenya for a follow-up to 2013's Mukunguni, Schneider elaborates on how To Rococo Rot came to forge such close links with a number of Scotland's most individualistic musicians.
"It started off in the late 1990s when The Pastels approached us to do a remix for Illuminati [a compilation of remixes of songs from 1997's Illumination]," he says. "We had been to Glasgow and Edinburgh a number of times already and were quite familiar with the music scene - Teenage Fanclub and pop stuff from Scotland - so we had an idea of the vibe of the city. I think it is because I'm from Dusseldorf and there's always been a close relationship between music and the art scene in Dusseldorf that seems similar to Glasgow.
"We understood the atmosphere as soon as we played in Glasgow a number of times and people took us to some art events and galleries. We got introduced to Bill through Stephen Pastel, and when we got the finished remix album I thought Bill's remix very much stood out . Then I was playing a solo show in Glasgow and he was on the bill that night and a couple of years later he invited me to record with him. He's a fantastic musician and I think, in terms of music, he's a maverick. He's somewhere between the pop world and the jazz world and that makes it interesting for us and for me to keep working with him."
Three albums have resulted from Wells' and Schneider's creative commingling, two of them in cahoots with trombonist Annie Whitehead and German electronic musician Barbara Morgenstern, and Schneider says more recordings are in the pipeline.
He nods to a more imminent alliance, though, which adds spice to next weekend's show. "I think we will collaborate with Bill in Glasgow. There is something in the air."
The results of another partnership endured a longer gestation, however. After remixing Thomson Colour from Illumination, Schneider and Ronald Lippok began rehearsing with The Pastels for what would become their fifth album, Slow Summits.
The year was 1999. Six years later, after participating in sessions with "The Pastels big band" for which producer John McEntire of Tortoise had flown in from Chicago, he says, "We stopped asking: 'When's the record coming out? Do you think it will be finished soon?' Stephen was like, 'Mmm … maybe … yeah … mmm. We've started writing new songs. Maybe we'll got to Chicago next year.'"
Released in 2013, the end product was worth the wait, Schneider says. "It took them 15 years to get it together," he says, laughing. "Although it sounds as though it was recorded only two years after the previous one. It's a lovely record and I'm very happy I witnessed the slow progress of Slow Summits."
In comparison, Instrument came together in a flash. Well, two years. To Rococo Rot's eight album, it is the first to feature vocals. These are provided by Arto Lindsay, the co-founder of No Wave heroes DNA, thus placing the trio on a list of his collaborators that also numbers Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Lindsay had seen the band play in New York and had met Ronald Lippok a few years ago but had never collaborated with them. "We were proposing names - 'What singer could you imagine?' - and I said, 'Maybe Arto Lindsay,'" Schneider explains. "Although none of us is a big Arto Lindsay fan or too familiar with him, we thought he could be the perfect voice because he has a fragile way of singing and he's not the type of singer who would immediately become the front person. In that sense it's a lovely collaboration."
Schneider was pleasantly surprised by Lindsay's manner during the recording sessions in Berlin. "He has a nice sense of humour, a very New York kind of humour - very dry and unpredictable - and he is a sober, rational person," says Schneider. "I expected him to be more … freaky." Laughter tumbles down the phone line.
Confounding expectations is not exclusive to Lindsay, though. "Most of our reviews [describe] us as conceptual German electronic music," says Schneider, "but we are very intuitive - there's not much concept behind it at all. We are a playful band." Think about their name for any length of time and you have to agree.
To Rococo Rot and the National Jazz Trio of Scotland play Platform, Easterhouse, on Saturday October 18. A bus to Platform will leave Mono, King's Court, Glasgow, at 6.30pm and return after the show.
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