Monolake / Silence
Artist Monolake
Album Title: Silence
Album Cover:
Primary Genre Electronica/Dance: Ambient Electronica
Format CD
Released 12/07/2009
Label Monolake / Imbalance Computer Music
Catalog No ML025
Bar Code No 8 81390 53052 6
Packaging Digipack
Tracks
1. Watching Clouds (5:09)
2. Infinite Snow (6:01)
3. Null Pointer (4:43)
4. Far Red (5:54)
5. Avalanche (6:28)
6. Void (3:29)
7. Internal Clock (8:16)
8. Shutdown (6:33)
9. Reconnect (5:52)
10. Observatory (8:36)
Date Acquired 07/01/2010
Personal Rating
Acquired from Import_CDs (Amazon)
Purchase Price 16.16

Web Links

All Music Guide entry:
Discogs entry:
MusicBrainz entry:

Notes

Packaging: 4-panel Digipak.
© Imbalance Computer Music 2009
Artwork [Uncredited] – snc
Composed By, Mixed By, Producer – Robert Henke
Mastered By – Rashad Becker
Glass Mastered At – Sony DADC – A0101441770-0101
Barcode (From sticker on foil): 8 81390 53052 6
Other (From sticker on foil): 708253052
Matrix / Runout: Sony DADC A0101441770-0101 15 A00
Mastering SID Code: IFPI L555
Mould SID Code (Variant 1): IFPI 94K7
Mould SID Code (Variant 2): IFPI 94K5

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed Folder: Monolake - Silence_dr.txt
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR         Peak       RMS        Filename                      
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR11       -1.60 dB   -18.55 dB  01 - Watching Clouds.flac    
DR11       -0.07 dB   -14.08 dB  02 - Infinite Snow.flac      
DR11       -1.00 dB   -15.01 dB  03 - Null Pointer.flac        
DR11       -2.15 dB   -16.36 dB  04 - Far Red.flac            
DR10       -1.59 dB   -13.47 dB  05 - Avalanche.flac          
DR12       -1.49 dB   -19.85 dB  06 - Void.flac                
DR11       -0.49 dB   -14.00 dB  07 - Internal Clock.flac      
DR10       -0.94 dB   -13.99 dB  08 - Shutdown.flac            
DR13       -0.00 dB   -14.90 dB  09 - Reconnect.flac          
DR11       -1.06 dB   -16.02 dB  10 - Observatory.flac        
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Number of Files: 10
Official DR Value: DR11
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reviews
Pitchfork - 7.8


Every high-end audio equipment showroom ought to have a few Monolake CDs on hand. Just as vendors of big-screen HD televisions bank images that bristle with detail-- rustling fields of crimson poppies, sparkling seascapes-- sellers of hi-fi systems could use Monolake's sub-bass throb and pin-prick highs to show off their painstakingly engineered products. The Berlin musician's work has always been attuned to shiveringly precise sonics, but Silence represents a new pinnacle of sound as full-spectrum embrace. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Monolake's production notes emphasize that the album was recorded and mastered without compression, making this a welcome counter-offensive in the "loudness wars.") That's not to say that this is merely music for hi-fi nerds. Blending elements of techno, dubstep, and ambient into an hour of suggestive, idiosyncratic drift, Silence presents programmed electronic music at its most sensually expressive.

Monolake knows his way around sound design, of course. Also known as Robert Henke, he was one of the original developers of Ableton Live, the popular performance and production software, making him not only something of a legend, but also a rarity: very few figures have achieved a similar degree of success in both recording and instrument design. To give you an idea of his impact, imagine a latter-day Robert Moog or Tom Oberheim, but with a discography as deep as his list of patents. (Monolake is actually a shifting, collaborative project; it began as a duo of Henke and fellow Ableton co-founder Gerhard Behles, who later left the group; since the mid-2000s, Monolake has occasionally comprised Henke and Torsten Pröfrock, aka T++. Silence, however, is credited as a solo Henke production.)

Ableton Live takes a fair amount of flak on producers' forums for delivering sound quality allegedly inferior to that of Logic Pro-- a claim that I've never seen substantiated. In any case, Silence, which was composed, edited, and mixed entirely in Live, offers ample evidence to the contrary. I can't think of a single piece of contemporary electronic music that sounds fuller, richer, or more nuanced. But this also isn't "pure" computer music; according to Henke's production notes, along with its synthesized sounds the album incorporates a wide range of real-world sonics-- metal percussion, dripping water, architectural acoustics, and all manner of field recordings-- that place it in a long tradition of musique concrète. This isn't an academic distinction; it's that openness to the world of sound that gives Silence such immersive depth.

Crucial to the success of the album is the way that Henke blurs the line between the sampled and the synthetic. One of the album's central elements is a recurring sound like mallets bouncing on metal cable-- whether it's "real" or "artificial" I don't know, or care-- whose fluid, regular/irregular bounce lends a delicious gravity. They might be the record's most radical achievement, counterbalancing techno's rigidity with rippling, quicksilver grace. In essence, these patterns translate Henke's interest in granular sound to the realm of rhythm: over and over, textures become patterns and vice versa. Silence is a masterful exploration of the vagaries of scale, one that-- quite unlike your HD plasma screen-- rewards equally whether witnessed close up, far away, or deep inside.

— Philip Sherburne, January 22, 2010

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13855-silence/

Learning how to be present in your life has become a constant topic of conversation with friends as the mid-twenties and the thirties approach. What draws us out of our lives in 2010 isn’t just the squeeze of social expectations, but also the mediated self-perception familiar to anyone who grew up in the post-TV world. Maybe the Internet is hyper-TV, the thing that instructs us in interpreting signs while also compelling us to cobble together our identities from atomized sources. Who isn’t a digital flâneur, fastidious about everything they consume, despite the fact of actually buying less and less? Is this the repressive-elective? Interpellation no longer takes the form of a Coke can telling you to "enjoy," but rather an above-ground pool party of tweets and status updates that collectively intone, "entertain yourself!" Creating one’s own channel has the same shape as your hypersensitivity to worlds of signs and social markers, and to the ways consuming makes you a certain kind of person or doesn’t. It’s a product of total content overload. You’re paying less for entertainment, but working more for it. Most of the signals you pluck out of the ether for your immaterial moodboard are compressed, meaning they’re limited in dynamic range, but optimized for availability. Compression means variety, and variety encourages you to develop an ever-more-forceful imaginative relationship with the osmotic power of culture, despite culture’s seeming inability to produce something that both looks new and  is.

This new album from Monolake, a.k.a. Robert Henke, is proudly compression-free. The dynamic range is indeed bonkers, but Henke’s method produces an album that inserts space into the burnt wicks of our attention spans. "It’s the abundance paradox...Having the choice between 5,000 compressor plugins whilst not understanding what makes a compressor really sound the way it does is pretty much my idea of hell." Henke said that in an interview about the album. As I suggested above, you don’t have to follow electronic music to understand what he means by "abundance paradox" — a notion that’s probably been around since well before Gutenberg — but in the music-gear sense, it’s been in circulation at least as long as artists have been producing their own jams. It’s a rich term, and even if the basic idea that restrictions can yield creativity isn’t a revelation, it has the power to describe why so many would-be musicians are paralyzed by choice. By extension, it also applies to our own constant, undifferentiated consumption. What makes Silence special is the same thing that’s made most other Monolake releases special: it presents an original, convincing and embodied sonic universe without ignoring composition.

Henke’s music as Monolake is, above all else, precise. It’s precise in execution, concept and intention. Monolake’s crispness shouldn’t be confused with the idea that Henke rises above his greater environment, though, even if his latest release seems to throw its body on the gears in a typically German, workmanlike fashion. There’s a clarity to his music that, despite associations with Ableton Live — he was very involved in the software’s development, and former bandmate Gerhard Behles is CEO of the company — and Berlin’s Chain Reaction label, is not just technical, but aesthetic. Silence is focused on a couple of things: exploring the boundary between found sounds and synthesized ones, the tension that emerges from superimposing different rhythmic scales, and inhabiting a huge dynamic range.

Even with these formal goals, the album is remarkable for how present it feels. Henke chooses and creates sounds with great care, then uses tools that typically make elements fit together — things intended to match beats or sync events to the same clock — to give narrative interest to these bespoke sounds. This sense of very active adjustments keeps Monolake from resting neatly in electronic music categories, even as Henke makes use of dubstep-like rhythms in a techno-oriented sound.

All this is not to make Silence sound like a cultural panacea. It is the kind of record that will appeal to those who can place it in a greater continuum of electronic music, but its success at simply being a compelling mix of sounds and rhythms has appeal outside of the genre Henke is nominally working in. Calling Henke a sound designer is accurate, but the associations seem too exclusive. You wouldn’t confuse anything here with a song, and yet, there’s as much momentum here as you’d find on a great pop record. The ordered chaos of everything going on in the upper frequencies of "Far Red" or the title-justifying percussion pools of "Avalanche" seem somehow free in time, with a mobile’s shifting focus rather than a sculpture’s massive finality. Listening to Silence in proximity to an earlier release like 2005’s Polygon_Cities or last year’s Atlas bears out the title’s promise of the spaces between the sounds meaning as much as the sounds themselves. It also seems that Henke’s sabbatical from direct involvement in Live, which he discussed in an interview with The Wire back in January, has given him time and space to focus on capturing new sounds and working within the limitations of his own technology, rather than trying to be software engineer and musician at once. It’s the sound of a deep dive in the sea of information. Though there aren’t many overtly human elements in the music, it’s unlonely and lively music, the sound of taking stock and making sense.

By Brandon Bussolini

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5573
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