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Monolake: Archaeopteryx (2CD, Imbalance, November 2020)

I didn’t know it, but I really needed this. There’s something very comforting about tucking into a hefty slab of crunchy Monolake loveliness, and this is 95 minutes of the good stuff. Not that this record doesn’t have it’s surprises. Sure, for much of the time we’re in familiar territory: skittering beats, sci-fi stylings that […]

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Music

Monolake: VLSI (CD, Imbalance, October 2016)

Hooray, Monolake is back! And he’s great! Again! Last week I was pontificating (again) about The Nature Of The Techno Album. In contrast to Roman Flügel’s, this is definitely a record which goes deep rather than broad, sticking to one style and refining and exploring and inhabiting it. Well, I suppose you could argue that […]

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Monolake: Ghosts (CD, Imbalance, February 2012)

I loved Monolake throughout the last decade, and I was a huge fan of 2010’s Silence. Ghosts is apparently the second in a trilogy, and the continuity is clear — not least in the welcome reappearance of the spooky sleeve notes, but also in the abstracted mood, the extended beatless atmospheric interludes, the distant clanking, the […]

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Music

Monolake: Silence (CD, Imbalance, December 2009)

If you don’t like Monolake (and there are fools out there who don’t, you know) then this probably won’t win you over. If you do, this will do very nicely thank you. Complex, stark, endlessly involving, and atmospheric, this is ultra-minimal headphones techno at it’s best. The thing that struck me most about this, compared […]