Audiopile Review: Berlin’s Robert Lippok is a real glitch survivor. Perhaps best known as a member of glitchy post-rock trio To Rococo Rot, he also recorded for Alva Noto’s Raster-Noton label. And while glitch sank into the black hole of cool during the 2010s, he never went away, working extensively as a multimedia artist. Now, Morr music is re-releasing ‘Open Close Open’, a 2001 mini album originally put out by Raster. It’s as perfect a representation of that label’s immaculately ornate and richly gritty aesthetic as you could hope to find. It’s an important entry into the glitch canon, to file alongside all those reissues the Keplar label has been blessing us with. Specifically, the elegiac strings that surprisingly emerge during the second track will really do it for fans of Ekkehard Ehlers. It is an absolute pleasure to see this music re-emerging from the gravitational pull that had sucked it into obscurity. Albums like ‘Open Close Open’ felt incredibly fresh at the time and, guess what, they still do.

In 1998, Carsten Nicolai, also known as Alva Noto, visited a sound installation created by Robert Lippok for a group exhibition in Weimar, Germany. Soon after, he invited Lippok to release music on his label Raster-Noton. Open Close Open was released in 2001 and marked the beginning of Lippok’s solo career. Before, Lippok had already played in Ornament und Verbrechen (with his brother Ronald Lippok) and To Rococo Rot (with Ronald Lippok and Stefan Schneider). The title of the EP is a linguistic reference to the instructions found on everyday objects. In fact, the sound of birds or a closing door can be heard. Besides field recordings, cultural fragments were used — including the sample of the famous “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony. No. 5. — and integrated into three loop-based pieces, that have been praised by Fact Magazine as “a masterclass in collage, looping and tactile processing.” The source material for Open Close Open initially served as a soundtrack for a video by Takehito Koganezawa, a visual artist from Japan. For this remastered vinyl reissue, Lippok revisited the original sound material and produced a new track called “Licht.”