Roche

Weirdos. Misfits. Wack jobs. DJs. They just can’t make a music writer’s job easy. They insist on being cryptic. Obscure. Obtuse. Smarty-pants. It’s tempting to say fuck it. Screw it. To hell with Solos Records and its progeny of wax-spinning wizards. Just try to find the label’s flagship artist Roche in a quick Internet search. Ha. What you’ll find is a company peddling pharmaceuticals, a laboratory specializing in nucleic-acid isolation, and a small Catholic school in Pittsburgh. What you won’t find is a purveyor of funky electronica that careers from dreamy melodies to nightmarish instrumentals with a galaxy of noise that uses thumping hip-hop beats, distorted samples, Pac-Man squiggles and R2-D2 burps. Not that the market for such wondrous cacophony is exactly huge. The Solos’ swing through the Midwest is intended to trumpet Roche’s new What’s Left EP, which features tracks such as “Intro Fo Show,” “Back Again Da Monk Stylee” and “Suck Meeeeeeee.” Uh-huh. The label is, naturally, based in San Francisco and Copenhagen, and it also teams Roche with DJ Enso to form Parallel Ensemble and further flummox writers and enchant audiences. The artsy bastards.