Anushka Chkheidze & Robert Lippok - Uncontrollable Thoughts Anushka Chkheidze & Robert Lippok

Absolutely majestic new music from one-third To Rococo Rot in excellent collab mode with Anushka Chkheidze. Emotional and gently encompassing.

It’s fair to say not every collaboration works but this one is really special – Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok’s Uncontrollable Thoughts is the duo’s debut joint release. As someone more familiar with Lippok’s work (To Rococo Rot and solo) Chkeidze seems like the perfect partner – their landscape is shared, new, strange, familiar. I’d say my favourite electronic release of the year – mostly light of touch but with the heavy emotional content of Four Tet and Lippok’s own To Rococo Rot – way of life abstractions and interactions rather than posted-in Ai-like content.  

This is the story. The Netherlands-based Georgian composer and the German sound artist from Berlin first met in 2019 in the context of a workshop programme that took place in Tbilisi. This led them to engage in a less conceptually driven form of music and real-time composition that corresponds with their respective environments. They draw on traditions such as minimal music or late 1990s and early 2000s electronica to integrate subtle beats with elegiac organ drones, playful melodies with lush textures. The first document of an ever-shifting intergenerational dialogue, Uncontrollable Thoughts is a product of mutual listening outside time.

Though they had access to professional studios, they chose to rent a simple rehearsal space, equipped with only the bare essentials—bass and guitar amps as well as a small PA—to maintain immediacy in their working process. The music they made together corresponded to and drew on the respective possibilities and shortcomings of this studio, much like their collaboration in general is characterised by the care with which they approach each other’s talents and ideas. While both had loosely defined roles—Chkheidze was responsible for the free-flowing beat programming and the evocative distortion came courtesy of Lippok, for example—they individually contributed in different ways to their joint process, which is as free of hierarchies as it is limitless. Hence, the duo’s focus on spontaneity and out-of-the-moment emergence makes them organically move beyond tried and tested conventions, resulting in music that seems to suspend time altogether. 

When the first chimes on Bird Song announce a piece that sets rattling kickdrums against a backdrop of layered drones and rhizomatically entangled melodic elements, it becomes clear why Uncontrollable Thoughts is uncontrollable thoughts. The album follows the constant detours of the subconscious of its makers, letting them explore moments of ecstasy such as on Rainbow, melancholy with Field, and the interplay of suspense and release through the ten-minute-long title track. But the different pieces also tie into one aother in various ways. The dirge-like organ drones on which Rainbow Road ends reappear in the beginning of Uncontrollable Thoughts, much like Chkheidze’s gentle yet emphatic piano chords on Field seem to provide the starting point from which the artist develops the striking motifs of the final piece, Opening, which of course suggests that the record as a whole can and should be enjoyed as a loop. The road goes on forever, we know that.

While there is much that sets Chkheidze and Lippok apart as solo artists, the major shared concern is human engagement with sound and space. Uncontrollable Thoughts is hence best understood as an extension of this practice; as an album that maps the geographies of their minds in motion, tracing musical movements as they slowly melt into each other.

The lightest of touches, the heaviest of feelings – what a majestic record.

SP  / mm