RODACH - Die Zeit ist rund [Time Is Round]

Eight years after his last album Seltsam erscheint unsere Lage [Our Situation Seems Strange], Michael Rodach is now releasing his sixth solo album with a title just as poetic. A picture that shimmers, that tells of rising up and rounding off, of departure and completion. On the one hand time seems to be a well-rounded matter that lacks nothing and where nothing is missed, but on the other hand also seems cyclic in the sense that it always lets us return to the beginning. Exactly this slight discrepancy suits Rodach well. “I like this certain vagueness; it creates space for the illogical, for the antithetic,” he says. “Of course I don’t know if time is round, but I’ve always liked the round dials on clocks for example. They perfectly express the circle that closes again and again and doesn’t represent an end, but rather goes into the next round over and over. When we celebrate our birthdays, we count how often we have circled the sun with our planet.”

Often we associate time with impermanence, talk about how it passes, elapses, trickles away and how intangible it is. Especially farewells let us realize that. In the past years Michael Rodach experienced the decease of his parents; an experience that deeply influenced his understanding of time. “When the long and throughout pleasant life of my parents ended, all of us involved felt the phenomenon of time; the time that still remains and the time that had passed. It was an almost peaceful understanding of something coming to an end. Regarding their lives we realized: that was a well-rounded success. If it goes into the next round in this case, nobody can say.”
On his solo albums Michael Rodach was always a multi-instrumentalist, sound explorer, tinkerer, developed his own samples, listened deeply into everything and was a fascinated discoverer of everything that creates sound. Especially the numerous audio dramas, for which he developed and composed sound and music, show this love for adventure. It suits him to immerse himself in a subject matter, to dive into depth for finding new sounds and atmospheres. With his new album, he now returns to his starting point in a very extraordinary way. Like none of his albums before Die Zeit ist rund is a guitar album and explores the countless tone qualities and facets of this “marvelously imperfect instrument,” as Rodach describes it. “That is what makes it perfect to me. I love the guitar. Already in the process of tuning, I turn the machine head and over a gearwheel and a shaft I change the tension on the string, which then oscillates faster or slower over a certain timeframe. Playing the guitar also means that I need to move my hands or fingers from one point on the guitar to another within a certain timeframe. If I swing my arms around now, they will make nothing but circles, because they’re obviously attached at the shoulders. The same principle applies to the hands and fingers. That means that I produce nothing but circular shapes with my fingers and hands while playing guitar. Since we’re talking about music here, these circular motions are also closely linked to time. In particularly wide-awake, conscious moments, when everything flows together with everything, …then time is round.”

Rodach perceives it as great fortune to have grown up in a world, in which he had access to music from all kinds of genres. In Hitchcock movies he was fascinated by the fabulous music of Bernhard Hermann, later Nino Rota and Brian Eno enthralled him. On the other hand the blues of John Lee Hooker was kind of a staple food for him. Thus, all kinds of musical styles were inspiration to him and in no way disturbed each other, but rather got along well for the most part. “Now, after many years I notice that when I compose, without the intention to do so, I often mix elements of the blues with musical styles that would not necessarily be associated with the blues. In this sense, Die Zeit ist rund almost became a blues album. ‘Musical storytelling’ is a trait of the blues to me and very often the basis of my compositions,” Rodach says, not lastly because most of his compositions were written for audio dramas and theatre pieces: so for stories essentially.

Storytelling counters impermanence. Loss is always also a loss of history and stories. Who was present? Whom can we ask? Who can report what happened? As long as stories are told, memories stays alive. Rodach enchants this storytelling, joins the volatile, brittle with the iridescent and whatever he touches and whatever touches him turns into sound. A very well-rounded affair.