- A 30-year retrospective from the other side of the internet's looking glass.
- It's hard to figure out where to start with Station Rose, the multimedia (and multidimensional) project of Gary Danner and Elise Rose. Wading through the never-ending embedded links on their website and archive, and setting aside sometimes apocryphal claims (have a go at parsing this one, from a gallery exhibition write-up: "Station Rose's 'Gunafa Clubbing', which began in 1988, was the first art form in the world in a club format"), a picture of the Viennese duo starts to emerge as two pioneers of both electronic music and maybe even the internet. Station Rose came into existence in the late 80s first as an art space, and then as a music-meets-video-meets-internet project between Rose and Danner. Alongside music, they've published four books, held a joint professorship teaching media science, and collaborated on a wide variety of AR and VR projects, to name a few accolades.
Their bread-and-butter, however, remains producing dance music. They began to turn heads in the early '90s with a tripped-out take on techno. Their first 12-inch in 1992 featured the formidable "Dave," a dark, trance-flecked track that (perhaps minus the sitar line) could have been released on any number of contemporary labels pushing the trance revival. Since then, they've put out a steady stream of EPs and LPs in places as far afield as DJ Hell's Gigolo Recordings and Frankfurt's Mille Plateaux. While techno has always been a staple, they've also dabbled in dub, electro, jungle and illbient. Their latest release, Digital Archive Vol 2, is an excellent primer, moving from dark and pounding peak time to windswept ambient on 15 tracks from the past three decades.
Station Rose have seen a spike in popularity in diggers' circles thanks to recent releases on labels like Spaziotempo and Childhood Intelligence. The duo have always had a penchant for the psychedelic (they even spent time with Timothy Leary in the mid-'90s), but it's easy to imagine the psilocybin chaos of "Gunafa2020" as a secret Z@P weapon, or causing havoc at a No Way Back party. The same is true of tracks like "Cufo and "Amiga Scisi-Transfer." Both tracks play with Halloween motifs—minor key chords and paranoid bleeps—that have became catnip to a certain type of DJ. But the best club tracks on the record are brighter. The 303 on "Blazer," by contrast, is more Tin Man and less Mike Servito, while "Final Rise" lets loose a dusty breakbeat and snippets of Rose's voice under the record's catchiest lead line lead line.
In this music, the internet is presented as an aesthetic, nearly utopian, ideal. Many of the tracks are filled with sounds and ideas that act like hyperlinks, with the duo clicking through to an infinite new set of portals at an astonishingly fast pace. Power chords shift into trap snare rolls on "Shopping Queen Down." Blown-out drums give way to trance euphoria on "Baby Yaga." How much you ultimately like these tracks will be correlated to how easily you fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, but the highlights come when dub enters the picture. "Glitchbrek" is like Kevin Martin and Stefan Betke jamming together with everything recorded deep in the red. The trip-hop "Surfing On Electronic Surfaces" stands up there with the best from Bristol, and the dub-meets-country of "Der Tote Aus Mersey" features some particularly memorable lonesome-on-the-prairie guitar licks.
The amount of detail and ideas on this record can be both dazzling and head-spinning. Some of the songs could be played by DJs, but club functionality is not top of mind for Station Rose. Music, more generally, feels like one of many mediums through which they explore the possibilities of life online. And while this feels very onbrand for 2022, when DJs and producers are exploring things like NFTs in ever greater numbers, this isn't bandwagon hopping. The duo, in fact, have been eerily prescient across their career. They've hosted regular live streams since 1999 (with the receipts to show for it), have run a newsletter focused on "virtual community" since 1996 and have understood that, as Danner told an interviewer, the "digital and the augmented will increasingly merge with the analog" well before discussions of the metaverse came along. Digital Archive Vol 2 is a good place to start for the uninitiated, sprialling deep into the strange, digital world of Station Rose.
Tracklist01. My Time Has Come
02. Baby Yaga
03. Final Rise
04. Blazer
05. Shopping Queen Down
06. Krescendo
07. Impro131021b
08. Cufo
99. 9 ETHs
10. Glitchbrek
11. Amiga SCSI-Transfer
12. Der Tote Aus Dem Mersey
13. SCSI
14. Surfing On Electronic Surfaces (1995 Remastered)
15. Mellotronic