Monolake - Studio

A bit later, the person tries to make sense of cryptical codes displayed on tiny screens of machines built decades ago in backyards in Hamburg, at labs in Japan, or envisioned in student dorms somewhere in a big fallen country far away. The person stares at user manuals originally written with typewriters, carefully turns the precious pages, scratches their head and finally nods.

It is a meditative state, introverted, but not quiet, more the opposite.

The person sits still, listening, thinking, feeling: Is it where it is supposed to be? What will it become? What is it? Is it something at all? Or is it just more data landfill?

The tea gets cold. Time flows in irregular intervals. Suddenly there is movement.

The person reaches out to a shelf, locates a long obsolete storage medium, a black and wobbly sheet of plastic the size of a small book. The person carefully inserts it into a large black box, presses a red button and waits.

Nearby something else becomes alive. The person enters commands on a terminal and walks over to a beautiful wooden instrument.

Several hours later, the sun outside long gone, the city almost asleep, the person removes the disk, turns off the black box and notices for the first time that day how loud the fans inside have been. The person flips a switch and all the little lights go off.

Silence and darkness.

My studio is my shelter, I feel comfortable there, surrounded by those wonderful inspiring machines. A small cosy room where ideas emerge, mature, morph, and find their final shape. 'Studio' is the result of spending time in that space. The album's intention is simple: Presenting a beautiful personal musical journey. The creative process in itself matters to me, the interaction with my instruments, the accidental discoveries, the successful execution of a vision and anything in between.

The result counts even more. I care deeply about the outcome of my work, I want it to be intentional, meaningful, consistent, and personal.

Most of the tracks on this album got revised countless times, and then even more, once I knew in which context and order I wanted to arrange them. I have been living with my music for months now, listening, thinking, changing, diving deeper and deeper into each piece.

This album did not came into existence in a hurry, it took as long as it needed.

I walked around my creations, did listen to them from the distance, physically, mentally, with friends, in all kinds of different contexts. I tried to understand my own work. I started to see patterns, hidden motifs, things that were buried in between too many layers of sound. What is essential? What is ornament? I reduced, rearranged, added again.

The closer I got to the final state of 'Studio' the more clarity I found. The inherent doubts and the nagging voices from the inside got more quiet, and a sense of achievement started to manifest itself. More and more details just fell into place. And now it is done. After making electronic music since almost thirty years I don't care anymore about genres, about how to label things. It is music, my own personal music, and that's it. Call it 'electronica' if you wish.

The music on this album has been constructed in Ableton Live. Most of the sounds have been captured from my collection of beloved hardware synthesisers and effects, often further processed until something completely different did emerge. Sometimes I spend days in the studio just recording sounds or creating new presets, without already having a composition in mind.

A few selected musical instruments contributed significantly to the palette of this album; a New England Digital Synclavier II, which also served as inspiration for the artwork, a Sequential Circutis Prophet VS, which is present on all Monolake albums since 1996, a Yamaha SY77, the a Linn Drum, and the Oberheim Xpander. And then there is Operator in Ableton Live, which I developed in 2004 and still love to use, and a lot of the other effects and instruments in the software. And of course my Granulator III instrument, and the PitchLoop89 audio effect.

The final sonic world is often the result of radical processing of these elements, via filtering, pitch shifting, time stretching and other types of processing, both in Live and with my hardware. The good old Alesis Quadraverb deserves a honorary mention here, so does the AMS RMX 16.

When composing, I often start with a drum groove, a simple pattern triggering samples I collected earlier, or percussive synthetic sounds. Afterwards I arrange other elements around it. This is often more a process of finding than searching. I have an idea what I might want to add, but when clicking through my presets or adjusting parameters, I discover something else. I record layers of layers of new elements. This is the fun part.

And from there the search for meaning and form starts: What happens when, where, why, how long, how often, with how much variation? During this very fragile process things often change a lot. This is where I oscillate between euphoria and crisis mode. The biggest challenge: throwing things away that did cost a lot of time to make but ultimately are just bad.

In the final stage of creating this album, I worked on all tracks at the same time, listening to them in the context of the others. A lot of things changed again as a result. Suddenly previously completely fine endings and beginnings made no sense anymore and needed to be reworked. I always aim to create an album which is one long journey, and where the successions of pieces feel more like movements of a symphony.

I removed elements, add new ones, and often only at this very late stage I started to understand which parts in each piece are central.

Again I added little details to each track: The digital creatures in 'Cute Little Aliens' became more varied and agitated, and I had a lot of fun embedding the scenery in a wet pre-human environment, with thunder, the ocean, granulated raindrops, and other forces of nature.

'Eclipse' got its dark cymbals at the beginning and turned more into a wild drumming exercise and a track called 'Spectral Run' got revised again and again for weeks, until I finally gave up on it and replaced it by something that I wrote within a few days and in great desperation: 'Signals'.

At the same time I gained enough distance to be able to reduce and simplify where needed: I cleaned up rhythmical patterns, let things develop over longer time periods again, or got rid of things that turned out to hide other things below that are far more worth noticing.

Today is May 13 2024, a beautiful sunny day in Berlin, and I decide that the album is finished.