Echo Location: Tosca’s Chillout Soliloquy

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Tosca turns down the beats and turns up the atmosphere on No Hassle.

You can hear an audio version of this blog with Tosca music here.

The Viennese duo called Tosca may take their name from the Puccini opera, but this plugged in pair doesn’t usually have romantic intrigue and mezzo-sopranos in mind when they compose.
Tosca is Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber.  Dorfmeister is a half of the Kruder & Dorfmeister duo who have been making downtempo electronica since 1993 with songs like “High Noon.”  In 1997 Dorfmeister teamed up with Huber, his childhood friend who was already a figure on the European avant-garde scene making music you’re more likely to hear in Paris’s Pompidou Center than a Berlin club.   As Tosca, Dorfmeister and Huber weren’t thinking operatic dramaturgy.  They were thinking street singers. “Chocolate Elvis” was their first single, using the field recording of a New York City street singer as the basis for their jazz inflected electronic vamp, which dd indeed, have an operatic  soprano sampled on there.

Tosca has released five full length albums and countless remixes of their own music and materiel from others.  But on their new CD, No Hassle, they’ve taken downtempo deeper than the chillout lounge with a CD of seductive rhythms and ephemeral melodies. They leave the vocals of previous albums behind, but seductive voices emerge on the swampy Bladerunner blues of “Birthday” with an ever so-cool spoken word enticement.

No Hassle is an electronica answer to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,”  a soundtrack to “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”  It’s The Echoes CD of the Month for June and I’ll feature it on Mondays show.

You can read a full review of Tosca’s No Hassle here.

You can hear an audio version of this blog with Tosca music here.

This has been an Echo Location.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))