Pieter Kock - Facial Recognition (2022)

R.I.O. welcomes Pieter Kock aka DJ Peacock, one of the guiding souls behind the Berlin based bar/micro club O Tannenbaum. Musically active since 1986 as singer, guitarist, drummer and noisemaker, Peter already released a string of albums under different aliases like Billie and Ballie, The Hitmachine and Taladu. Since the early 1990s he narrates haunting sonic stories as a DJ, playing a vast palette of styles - from cosmic and leftfield techno to tape experiments, sound-art, wave, world, jazz, punk, industrial, and all that weird pop music. Last year saw him liberating his first solo recordings under his civil name as a cassette tape named “Flocks & Murders of Entitled Spirits”, dropped by the Berlin/Vilnius based label Musikii. It unreels twelve sensitive tunes, made with the help of online synths and drum computers, Youtube travel- and talk show-videos or samples from Youtube synths- and rhythm boxdemonstration videos. Now he refined his idiosyncratic style of music crafting a bit deeper and shares “Facial Recognition” – a gently twisted album that unites hypnagogic pop, library dances, cosmic funk, leftfield grooves and experimental sonic zones under one roof. His seven found sound tunes are layering a rhizomatic veil of unidentifiable web sounds, all transmuted into hazy looped ambiances, that trigger unconscious brain activities with future samples from the past, woven rhythm structures and a simultaneity of moments, derived from myriad world wide web informations. When it’s true, that nothing can have value without being an object of utility, then Pieter Kock managed to give the internet a new rate while using its manyfold informations as a tool to create art. Art, whose originality isn’t defined by the creator’s playful virtuosity. Instead, his sensibility of deciphering unheard rhythms, harmonies, and melodies in an avalanche of prefabricated ideas is his mastery. Pieter Kock transformed them into unfamiliar compositions with a familiar touch, that can evoke the feeling of being synchronous in a world of the many. A data rain without drops, a stream of consciousness without cognizance.
Come in, drop out.