Rothko, the band, was born a trio: a triumvirate of London boys on
basses, their radically reduced palette so austere and minimal they
showed they'd learnt lessons from the artist from whom they stole their
name. With such a handle, it was no surprise that their music sought to
depict emotional expressionism going hand in hand with reductionism,
their slightly gimmicky line-up merely musical parameters — and not a
hindrance of contrivance — to shape their eventual output. After three
longplayers in the three-bassplayer form, Rothko founder Mark Beazley
bust up the band, and set to exploring the aesthetic of his rock 'n' roll
handle in hand-in-hand collaborations with other humans sympathetic to the/his
tonal gear; subsequent Rothko recordings were undertaken in league with Four
Tet, Susumu Yokota, BLK w/BEAR, and
Delicate Awol. It was his union with the latter — on the Rothko
longplayer A Continuing Search for Origins — that brought Beazley
together with Caroline Ross, who contributed voice and flute to a couple
of that album's cuts. Here, on A Place Between, the pair come together
in that godly place between two humans, wedded across a whole album in a
wholly collaborative, co-billed fashion. Once again, minimalism reigns,
but it's a painterly, passionate use of such, the caked-out foundation
of speaker-rattling basstone daubed with melodic basslines left
lingering and dangling, and the washed-over chimes of keyboard chords,
Ross's spare singing, and ghosted guitar all like contrasting colors
blinking from behind the cracks of the apparent monochrome. But, as
important as the instruments they use are, equally important are the sounds
they don't use, this union using silence as their rhythm, too; its
every echo of nothingness builds to the point where what isn't there
seems to dictate tempo and temperament. Where, in the early days of the
band, Rothko seemed quite post-rockist in the way that they fretless'd
their way to all sorts of smooth, beautiful, and willfully-abstracted
bass sounds, here there's something almost classical — in a peculiar,
perhaps postmodern way — about how Beazley and Ross's devotion to a
greater sense of artistry leads them to sounds that sound almost holy.
It all culminates with whispered spoken-word from Ross, reciting the
lyrics of the album's opener as its spoken-word closer, the conclusion
herein hearing her intone the text — "You make/ my whole
landscape/ fall/ to/ the now-nonexistent/ floor/ You shake/ my whole idea/ of
what a life/ is for" — with purely poetic measure.
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