Ref: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=239779

HC – many thanks for joining us, even via your snippet!

It goes like this. I wake up in my abandoned shelter made of found brick and metal scraps. It’s been raining for over a month now. But the water collecting in the corners is undrinkable. It is full of ash and oily fluid. There is only one way out of here. I step outside into the eternal darkness, and climb the nearby unrecognizable object. Far ahead is a column of rising smoke. The electrical storm rolls in the distance. I start walking towards the echo of a machine made rhythm. I feel sad for our abandoned planet. And I don’t have any hope for survival.

The liner notes of Monolake’s seventh album, Silence, tell a different story. But in my mind, there is my own. Either way – the story is futuristic, full of tension, survival, and hope. The words are reflected in music, composed by Robert Henke during the last year leading up to September 2009. Henke’s staple sound has created a whole new branch of style springing off of minimal techno. This metallic, atonal, and rhythm driven mathematical progression captures your nerve endings, and sparks through your cells. The cavernous area of your head that was once possessed by thought is now a plausible site for transmission.

On Silence, Henke moves further away from the four-to-the-floor pounding beat towards a dark, and groovy rolling pattern, that must be heavily influenced by dubstep. That’s not a surprise, considering that Monolake’s new partner in crime, Torsten Pröfrock, has recently bridged the gap between dubstep and techno by remixing Shackleton’s Death Is Not Final as T++. The influence is contagious. And in this chain reaction Henke creates his own style. And the production? It’s pristine!

I’m not going to waste your time here, and tell you about Henke’s contribution towards the evolution of sound on more than one physical plane – you can read all about contributions towards Ableton or his own designed midi-controller Monodeck on Wikipedia. What I want to capture here is how this album made me feel. And that indescribable feeling is pretty close to what I felt for the first time when I heard Plastikman’s Sheet One back in 1993. Since then I’ve been jonesing for more. And Henke has finally hit that spot. His Silence is the answer.

Silence is released on Monolake’s own label – [ml/i] (Monolake / Imbalance Computer Music), and is available in CD, digital, and 2xLP formats. This release follows Monolake’s recent two track EP, Atlas / Titan which was in turn remixed by T++. There is also a 60-minute single track, endlessly permutating atmospheric installation piece released by Robert Henke this summer, titled Indigo_Transform (Imbalance Computer Music, 2009).

Mark, I reckon the space thing (Reviewer’s Bush disease setting in…?) is a combo of RH’s deliberate conceptual design and the software’s ability to provide for the kind of separation and spatiality sought – this being almost part of Ableton’s mission, as I understand it.

Joshua, I picked up that ‘Interstate’ remaster when it came out (2008, wuzzit?), and can vouch for it being a notable improvement on the original (provided you don’t play it on a portable with earbuds or through the glorified airvents of your lappie chappie).

And Colin, it’s odd how uncouth and wild at heart T++’s roughneck productions sound next to Monolake’s designer bumpscapes – as if one were the educated and articulate but slightly less interesting of a pair of twins, the other being the evil one who never learnt what a chord or harmonic was, and didn’t care, cos he’d mastered a variant of mutant technoid rhythm + tamed noise. I like ‘em both, but a genuine hybrid of the two, with RH’s glasses and pate getting a right and proper smudging up and bloodying at the hands of TP’s rude mechanicalism would be something to behold.

http://www.turnmeup.org/

- in the notes for the latest album by Elbow. This is after all music to be heard on a good stereo system (a what?) and to be experienced through careful listening; it is not just another square of the noise quilt designed to prevent one from hearing anything else. I recall in connection with this reading an interview with the members of Kraftwerk around the time of Man-Machine in which they revealed that they liked to cut elevator music speaker wires and carried pocket scissors for the purpose, the idea of music as background being offensive to them.

This may be a series of questions. To restate the first, How much is that gap the result of compression (etc.)? Then, how much of the resulting music was composed precisely with that sense of distance in mind? And then, finally, what would earlier Monolake records sound like without compression (etc.)?

At times it isn’t just sound engineering; it’s sound design — the music uses the separation of these elements to make a narrative comment about their colocation, about the distance between percussion and rhythm. At others, the gap is so wide that I wonder whether the percussion is playing a role not unlike that of a lead vocal, or at least a lead guitar, so sharp and succint and in focus is it against a rich, dark, cloudy backdrop.

Minimal techno, even at the abstract distance from genre that Monolake is attempting here, sounds all the more fresh and new because it doesn’t have that missive-from-the-bunker feel; dank cave it may be, but it’s a massive, massive cave.

All – seen Headphone Commute’s interview with Henke just published? Very illuminating…

“The most important change for me is the fact that Silence is the first release with which I feel completely fine as far as the rhythmical side is concerned. And I am very much looking forward to follow this momentum further and see where I’ll land next.”

http://reviews.headphonecommute.com/2009/12/16/two-and-a-half-questions-with-robert-henke/

Accompanied by a review of Silence (http://reviews.headphonecommute.com/2009/12/16/monolake-silence-imbalance-computer-music/):

“What I want to capture here is how this album made me feel. And that indescribable feeling is pretty close to what I felt for the first time when I heard Plastikman’s Sheet One back in 1993. Since then I’ve been jonesing for more. And Henke has finally hit that spot. His Silence is the answer.”

I’ve suggested HC joins our discussion…

In turn, that may be part of why I qualified my enthusiasm for Silence. Apart from Void, which is lushly lovely (& clearly the dripping sound’s exemplar), the album is less engaging than the year’s earlier 12″s – immediately anyway.

I wonder how T++ would revved up Far Red, for example. Although others here cite it & its ratcheting/chattering colour is certainly enjoyable, it may be my least favourite track. The mid tempo that Colin complains of doesn’t help, agreed.

I suspect that a Profock refix would sound more like the following Avalanche. Out of very similar ingredients (no ratchet, though) it generates significantly more dynamism & warmth. A slightly higher bpm, some somewhat portentous chording & a bit of percussion colour seem to explain the difference – clearly in such a reduced music, the judgement of just how much to leave out is very subtle…

One highlight not mentioned yet is the percussive rain in Watching Clouds. It takes more than a minute before this wonderful, insistent clattering – like grit turning in a cylinder – even starts to hint at itself. Then it rattles off-kilter all the way through the track, right up to that almost languid start to Infinite Snow.

It seems even to hang over that second track during its percussive staking-out up the first zithery noise starting up (the second, which sounds like the theme to a post-Cold War spy film set in the new Berlin, is another highlight for me…).

Joshua, thanks – as ever – for the Anthony Manning tip. I’ll be following that up for sure.

Julian’s comparison to latter-day ECM is apposite: both share a distanced coolness that I find unengaging, particularly when combined with the predominantly mid-paced rhythms and the relative lack of conceptual development. I find all of this particularly strange given the ongoing involvement of T++ whose 12″ odyssey since 2006′s Aquatic/Storm has had me enthralled.

Having said that, I’m impressed by Silence. There’s a welcome sense of space and silence. Void is a case in point, it’s like a green lung in a city or negative space in a design. On the other hand, I suddenly wondered how different it was to FSOL’s Lifeforms. The answerphone messages on Reconnect remind me of Scanner’s early phone work. The lead sounds on Internal Clock and Infinite Snow are attractively dramatic: they have a physicality that’s very welcome in such a synthetic environment.

I look for a sense of a given music’s significance, its wider context, even if it’s just at a personal level. Monolake’s non-musical aspects – the imagery/titles/texts communicate a relationship between nature/humanity and technology/industry. In that sense it relates to Kraftwerk’s oeuvre just as much of Mika Vainio’s work does, but it’s a big subject that provides a lot of potential territory to explore.

I like the accompanying text – I’m a sucker for that kind of parallel medium; explored beautifully on Jon Hassell’s City: Works of Fiction and David Toop and Max Eastley’s Buried Dreams. Mixed feelings then for me: I’m finding Silence much more engaging after six or seven listens than previous releases, but am not yet confident that I’ll continue to listen to it. It seems like it’s a promising (re)start.

In this case, the occasion appears to be the release of Max for Live, the port of the Max/MSP software to the Live environment. What that means, precisely, for his music might be something for us to discuss here.

Of course, software is a tool, even if it’s a tool he assists in forging. What’s essential is the resulting music, and from the crystalline patterns of the album’s “Void,” which sounds like a Calder sculpture being used as an instrument in a dank cave, to “Far Red,” which takes his penchant for minimal techno on a refreshingly varying journey, there is much here to listen to and into.

Rhythm has often been the distinguishing factor between Monolake records and those that Henke records under his own name, the latter of which tend toward the atmospheric. On Silence, it’s less a matter of rhythm than percussion that I have found myself paying close attention to — which is to say, on Silence, percussion is atmosphere.