Here's the story: King Roc wrote dance music, once. He's half of the wildly successful techno / deep house duo Two Armadillos with Giles Smith of UK club pioneers Secretsundaze. He DJs Brazil, China, Australia, a couple of times each year each as well as regularly playing the big European and UK clubs. He lives in Brazil and Berlin but really he's a nicely-mannered gent from southwest London. And he's carved out quite a job reinterpreting big names from Future Sound of London to New Order to S-Xpress to new blood like D-Nox and Beckers.
But he doesn't like to talk much, and two years back he was fed up to the back teeth of 4/4 for the dancefloor. So when he met Australian artist Seb Godfrey of Drunkpark, they hatched a plan together.
A concept album that won't explain itself.
(But it started with some ideas about dreams, intuition, happenstance and coincidence.)
No talking. Big secret theories. A concept album.
Starting with: A set of four collectable 12"s (each with a lovely poster!) Artwork by Seb, each 12" with its own theme - the first of which was "chance". Music by King Roc - but the 12s had to run from ambient to trip-hop to indie to Orbital-style oldschool to techno.
And then: for the final CD, each track had to be ripped apart and thrown back together for its reappearance on the CD - with trip-hop transformed into a beautiful vocal number, or techno into lush, beatless cinematics.
Voila - the CD you have now, Chapters.
The hype has been building for some time now round the 12"s and their visuals - an increasingly rare, non-disposable approach to vinyl that King Roc paid for from his own pocket. "They're the best thing King Roc has ever done" - IDJ. "[This] will be the year King Roc claims his crown ... [the 12"s are] dreamy ... elegant ... gorgeous ... bittersweet ... melancholy" - DJ mag. And that's alongside the more experimental names raving about his Two Armadillos work, like Agoria calling it "perfect for summer days".
What's the concept for the album? - You can explain these things, says King Roc, but it sounds arrogant. The questions have to be more important than the answers. There's some maths in there [Phidias Gold is sequenced to follow the timing of the "Golden Ratio" of intervals of 1.68], there's a dream about an enormous plant made of brick that inspired the entire fourth EP, Dreamattic, and Flow is about those few times in life when you are totally ego-free and entirely in the moment.
But the background can be saved for Seb's video for track one, the Beginning, (9 Mar) and for the website (15 Mar). There are no direct answers. There are only chapters in a person's life...
JOIN THE KING ROC MAILING LIST
1) King Roc - Beautiful But Weird - Mutual Society
2) Stimming & Einmusik - Magdalena - Diynamic
3) Mahilas Safras - Cards - Greatstuff
4) Alex Kenji - Adelante - Hotfingers
5) Mandy & Booka Shade - Donut - Get Physical
6) Ramon Tapia - Mi Esposa - Greatstuff
7) King Roc 'Tirades' Mutual Society
8) Falko Brocksieper - Covert Action - Tuning Spork
9) Ricky Stone - In Miami - King Roc Remix Flat Belly Recordings
10) Ido Ophir & Gabe - Mastermind - eVapour8
