When he works as Monolake (originally in partnership with Gerhard Behles, solo for several years now), Robert Henke crafts stark minimal techno that helped define the groundbreaking Chain Reaction label. As often happens with electronic producers, the records he releases under his own name tend to showcase his more "serious" academic side, jettisoning beats in favor of studied digital soundscapes. As with Piercing Music (1994) and Floating.Point (1997), Signal to Noise comes from Henke's own Imbalance Computer Music imprint, which is now distributed by Kompakt.
One of Henke's enduring fascinations is completely digital composition that remains connected to the sounds of nature, and the three tracks on Signal to Noise continue his experiments in this vein. In Henke's sleeve notes, which perhaps give too much away (admitting that his "recordings mainly consisted of harmonic droning, so I found them to be a bit boring after extensive listening"), he details his working method, which involved pitch shifting and filtering drones from the Yamaha SY77 synthesizer. The neo-moonscape photograph on the cover from Joshua Tree National Park is an appropriate visual analog to these dry and dusty tracks.
"Signal to Noise I" is 20-plus minutes of morphing static, with an extended chord or two that also undergo gradual filtering. While much drone music gets mileage out of slow changes that exist in the threshold of perception, Henke's filter sweeps are explicit and obvious, such that you can almost see his hands slowing turning the nobs. "Signal to Noise II" is more standard ambient territory, with a simple series of held tones, while "Studies for Thunder" sews rolling booms, explosive crackles, and cyborg cricket chirps into the digital wind.
Henke's prized Yamaha dates from 1990, but his favored textures seem much older. It all sounds a bit like an early synthesizer artifact circa Wendy Carlos' 1972 record Sonic Seasonings, illustrating how filtered white noise assumes the character of wind and rain with the proper tweaks applied. It's completely devoid of drama (quite intentionally, I'm sure), and instead seems to exist to facilitate some sort of meditative state. Too often, though, Henke makes the easy choices, and the predictability of these sounscapes keeps the listener from full immersion. The uninspired title was the first clue that this was one to pass on.
