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.
