To Rococo Rot - ABC123

Helvetica recently got lairy and obnoxious and invited a few strippers into the jacuzzi to celebrate its 50th birthday. Well it probably didn't, it's too straight-laced, too clear cut, too corporate and bland, which is precisely why it is one of the most wildly used fonts in our information overload world. Sans strippers, the birthday was marked by, amongst other things, the commissioning of electronica trio To Rococo Rot to record a piece in tribute to this no-nonsense font. Partly produced using a Cage-ian twist of producing sounds according to how they figure graphically into the alphabet rather than any musical logic, ABC123 is far more exciting and nuanced than its muse. This is wonderful electronica that layers hypnotic pulses over bleep riffs and mechanical percussive whirls. The end result creates a dizzying but pleasant claustrophobia, like being stuck inside a typewriter (albeit occasionally one of the Mugwump typewriters out of Cronenberg's Naked Lunch). [Ali Maloney]