There’s uncut, and then there’s four times the original length. That’s how Monolake‘s expanded edition of “Indigo,” the track that closed his 2001 album Cinemascope, sizes up. The original track, at about eight and a half minutes long, is now available, for free for the month of December, at Monolake’s website, monolake.de. The key elements are a swelling bassy substructure and a high-fidelity recording of water drops. Now for more than half an hour, those raw materials collude and collide in slow motion, occasionally gathering in a deep dub. That found sound, it turns out, is almost a decade older than the album. Says Monolake of the recording:
… I came across a long deep ambient session that I had already edited down into a shorter track that was incuded in the Cinemascope album in 2001.
Here comes the original session, from the moment where I decided to press record till the point when I thought it is enough. I do not remember so much of that session, but I am quite sure it was late at night, and there were some friends present and we were all a bit stoned…
Tech stuff: The water drop sample has been recorded in my bathtub in april 1993. It is played back and processed with an ASR-10 sampler, which also contributes most of the other sounds. Which were themselfes recordings of sounds created with a Juno-6 and a SY77. All mixed together on a small mixer and with lots of reverb from the ASR-10, from a PCM-80 and a Quadraverb. Sequenced with Logic 1.0 running on a Apple Macintosh IIcx, recorded straight to DAT.
Monolake posts a new free download almost every month, but with the stipulation that no one link directly to the file, so just click on the above link — while the calendar still reads 2007.
Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Ike Turner, the rock’n’soul legend who will forever be remembered as Tina Turner‘s abusive husband, passed away earlier this week (November 5, 1931 ”“ December 12, 2007). I’ll never forget standing in the refurbished Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and being told the story of the chance damage to a speaker, the sound of which reportedly permeated Turner’s “Rocket 88,” thought by many to be the first rock’n’roll song (
(2) It isn’t just that the album as a format is dying; it’s that the whole idea of a multi-song release as an even somewhat constant entity is dying. Case in point, the new EP of remixes of Amon Tobin‘s song “Kitchen Sink” (pictured left) off his excellent album Foley Room (both released on Ninja Tune). It contains four different mixes, one each by Clark, Sixtoo, Nosia and Boxcutter — but if you buy it digitally through 
(13) Speaking of Lanois, I’ve received some thoughtful responses to the essay I published at 
But this santafesound post is special. The half-minute recording is that of a Buddha Machine dying (