The video for W’s opening cut “Doorway” is unforgettable. Janine Rostron – who is Planningtorock – is seen face on. The music is tense, yet sepulchral. The voice is treated, neither male nor female. With her prosthetic nose, she looks alien but not cutely so. It’s disturbing, a bad-dream version of what Cindy Sherman might film to soundtrack the song.
Rostron isn’t from another planet. She was born in Bolton and now lives in Berlin. W is her second album. She plays all the instruments. She produced W. One track is called “Janine”, another is titled “9”, from the “nine” in her first name. Planningtorock is Rostron, and is about Rostron. She is her art.
W is a frosty, seductive, mainly electronic thing - even when organic instruments like strings and a saxophone peep through. This soundscape pulses repetitively, sometimes at dance-floor speed, but mostly at less than a stroll. Rostron’s voice is as if heard from a deep ravine. Pain is evoked. Warmth comes with Arthur Russell-textured strings on “The One” and "Milky Blau”. “Janine” itself is an Arthur Russell cover. W demands to be heard all the way through.
Taken in isolation, W is a dream. But allowing the outside world in brings problems. Rostron’s nom-de-musique is close to Rockettothesky, the former handle of Norway's Jenny Hval. Chance maybe, but probably less so are similarities to Fever Ray, the solo vehicle of Karin Dreijer Andersson of Sweden’s The Knife. Back in 2005, Rostron had, on her own label, issued a compilation featuring The Knife. The idea of W paralleling Fever Ray isn’t limited to the music – the processed, old-man-sounding voices, the glacial electronica, the sawing rhythms and the stately pace of songs like “Doorway” and “The Breaks” are common to both. “Going Wrong” could be from the Fever Ray album. Both Andersson and Rostron conceal themselves behind masks, whether prosthetics or head-to-toe costumes. W was mixed in Sweden in 2010 by Christoffer Berg, who did the same job for The Knife’s sole album, issued in 2009. And Rostron co-wrote music for the 2010 opera Tomorrow, In a Year with Andersson.
Fever Ray didn’t tackle Munich Machine/Giorgio Moroder-influenced disco beaters like W's winning “Living it Out” and all this could be coincidence – artists on similar paths reaching similar conclusions. But it does take some of the shine away from W.
Watch the video for W’s “Doorway”
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