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WHITETREE: CLOUDLAND

Inspired and named after a very special, paradise-like retreat in Amos Tutuola’s novel ” The Palm-Wine Drinkard“, the album is the cosiest pair of french mittens, helping to withstand the cold and fast pulse of our technology-driven times. Think about it: ”Cloudland" is not the first effort to merge electronics with classical music. Far from it. Carsten Nicolai worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald inject Ravel's Bolero with a techno twist, a whole new generation of musicians is as comfortable with a laptop as with classical instruments. Yet brave and remarkable efforts, Cloudland brings across a playfullness, a looseness and broadness which makes the album something unique.
The reasons are obvious: The Lippoks are not your typical electronic music composers. Nor is Ludovico Einaudi your average classical composer. Their individual bodies of art have always been about this special extra mile, an effort hardly anybody seems to care about these days anmore. With their main project ”To Rococo Rot", the Lippoks, together with their fellow colleague Stefan Schneider, have not only recorded an impressive yet diverse catalogue, mixing band-based tracks with all sorts of electronic sounds. The project also always benefited from Ronald Lippok's unique style of drumming, giving their music a lush, yet powerful and almost sequenced feel.
While all Whitetree-members found their individual styles and voices to articulate their musical visions, it is this collaboration which brings all their seperately developed talents together in a dense, unexpected sequence of songs.
It all started in 2006, when Einaudi approached the Lippoks to do an italian tour together. A week of rehearsals was all they built their set on. "It was a dedicated club tour", Ronald Lippok remembers, "small venues, sometimes it was almost impossible to get the piano onto the stage." The trio connected well while on the road and decided to record some of the material in the studio. Planet Roc in Berlin was chosen, a place which has "History" written all over it. The former broadcasting centre of East German radio has a reputation for perfect acoustics and all kinds of special you need for anything from recording an orchestra to making a radio play as realistic sounding possible. "We played as a band. Always live, always in one room", says Robert Lippok.
The mixture of quiet and loud, the always shifting level of energy is intriguing indeed. The shocking thruth: There isn't a single piece on the album which distinctivly identifies one member of the group as the composer. The joint effort is, among other things, what makes ”Cloudland" such a unique recording.
(Thaddeus Herrmann / De:Bug Magazine)