Monolake / DB benefit September 10, 2005

MONOLAKE/DB BENEFIT
SAT. SEPT 10, 2005
TBA
$12.00
MONOLAKE
Ableton, ml/i, Chain Reaction
Berlin, Germany

NORDIC SOUL
Decibel, Synth Club, Dreaming in Stereo
Seattle

PAUL EDWARDS
Krakt, PG Series, Decibel
Seattle
2005 Decibel Benefit Show featuring:

Featuring:
Monolake - Berlin (Ableton Live, ml/i, Chain Reaction) Live PA
Nordic Soul - Seattle (Dreaming in Stereo, Decibel) Live PA
Paul Edwards - Seattle (PG Series, Krakt, Oscillate) Live PA
*Live visuals by Randy Jones (Cycling 74, Orac)

$10 presale and $12 @ the door

venue tba

MONOLAKE INFO
Monolake is an open project dedicated to computer generated music, founded in 1995 by Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. We were impressed and influenced by minimal techno music and drum&bass and at the same discovered the sonic richness and sophistication of accademic computer music. These poles became the source and inspiration for our own creations.

Our first releases on the highly acclaimed Berlin techno label Chain Reaction, an offspring of Basic Channel, brought us some public attention. Due to our involvement with the Elektronische Studio der Technischen Universitat Berlin we also had the chance to do comissioned works for occations like "50 years of music concrete" and numerous other projects. The first Album from 1997, titled Hongkong, combined processed environmental sounds captured during the International Computer Music Conferernce 1996 in Hong Kong with synthesized timbres.

It became the blueprint for a specific monolake style which is often permutating complex rhythmical structures interacting with rich textural elements, providing depth and color. The second album, Interstate, released 1999 became the first release on Robert Henkes own label, [ml/i] . While the music on Hongkong was still very much influenced by minimal techno and dub, Interstate was significantly more complex and more orientated towards micro-editing of sonic particles. This detailed manipulation of sound was possible due to self written software, realised in Max/MSP, which allowed us to create textures and rhythmical gestures impossible to achive elsewise. Gobi. The desert, a 34 mintue epic track from 1999 was completly done in our own software, mostly Max/MSP but also with the beta version of Native Instruments "Reaktor", since Gerhard Behles wrote the sampling and re-synthesis part of it. A bit later he started his own software company, Ableton, which I joined. The third album, Gravity, released 2000, brought the focus back towards dance music and the dark, noisy and atmospheric pieces exposed there made monolake an often requested live performer in clubs. Cinemascope, 2002, stood in retrospect for a time of unsecurity, both personel and in a general musical context. It contains a variety of different pieces, but lacks the coherence of the earlier works.

After 2000, everyone involved in electronic club music seemed to search for new ways of expression. Techno was nearly dead and technology had nothing new to offer as a compensation for the lack of inspiration. Cinemascope also stood for a period of significant changes in production. A typical monolake track created by Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke was the result of setting up a system of software and hardware which allowed to use the studio as a real time instrument and "perform" with it. The results were endless recording sessions, later edited into pieces. This kind of workflow did not fit anymore when working alone. The production process and environment had to be re-thought. While producing Cinmeascope the studio changed every day, and every setup seemed to be inappropriate. At the end I took everything appart, and started to work at home with a laptop. The studio of the future: no studio?!

Momentum came out in 2003 and has been done in my appartment, mostly within the software Ableton Live, to which we added more and more features with in every version. It became the hub and center of my studio. Momentum was the first monolake album I completly realised alone. The counterpoint to Momentum was Signal to Noise [2004], an ambitious, serious work of sound art which irritated some journalists due to its radical absence of what they considered to be real music, released under my own name to distinguish it from the monolake works. At the same time, monolake became again a more collaborative project, since T++, who also worked with me on some parts of Cinemascope joined the team. We started working on music which feels to us like the most exiting re-invention of the wheel since the beginning of the monolake project. While providing the expected timeless flow of rhythm and sound, the underlying rhythmical structure and the sound design itself is very different. A first result of our collaborative effort is polygon_cities, released in summer 2005.