PLANNINGTOROCK
PLANNINGTOROCK
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Planningtorock is the vehicle of expression of Janine Rostron, a musician and visual artist from Bolton who has lived in Berlin for ten years. W is her new album, the follow-up to her 2006 debut Have It All, which was a full-on chamber-pop romp that established Planningtorock as anything but orthodox. A ball of energy that landed by happy accident in the middle of the art, fashion and music worlds, Planningtorock has allowed Janine to travel the globe performing at gig venues and arts events. She's built a formidable reputation with a theatrical solo show that she performs, wearing white and sometimes donning a customised PTR helmet, in front of the mesmeric videos she's made for each track. Multimedia and sometimes kind of multi-gender, Planningtorock seems to raise more questions than Janine often has answers for, which tickles her. While she is a new name to many, those who know Planningtorock tend to form a strong emotional connection with her work. No doubt about it, Janine is totally out there on her own, and with W, she's raised the bar several notches, producing a powerful soul odyssey that ravishes the listener and comfortably ranks as one of the DFA label's finest releases. Psychedelic in a stimulating, mind-altering sense, on W Janine stretches sounds and curdles her voice, creating a queasy rococo rush that has an intoxicating quality.
Janine grew up near Bolton. Her darker humour comes from there. Aged seven, she started learning the violin, at which she excelled. Immersed in classical music, playing in youth orchestras, she says she didn't listen to pop properly until she was 20. After a stretch at art college in Sheffield she moved to Berlin in 2002. Two years later she launched her label, Rostron Records, with Planningtorock's EP Eins, following it in 2005 with a compilation LP called Carousel of Souls that featured tracks from the Knife and the Soft Pink Truth. Have It All came out a year later. One day she received a fan-email from James Murphy, of LCD Soundsytem and the DFA label in New York, who would later invite Planningtorock to open for LCD Soundsystem on a couple of legs of their Sound of Silver tour. She also took to the road with the Knife, Peaches and Hot Chip, having been personally asked by them. Keen-eared readers will be aware that last year Planningtorock was involved with the opera Tomorrow, In a Year, for which she co-wrote the music with the Knife and Mt. Sims.