Bleep

The studio can be a site for many things: peace, chaos, intense focus, spur of the moment improvisation, experimentation, surprise. Techno visionary Robert Henke returns to his Monolake alias and Imbalance Computer Music label after four years with his creative space in mind, distilling all it contains into an absolute masterclass in mind bending, world building, cinematic sound design and electronica.

As the cover teems with lichen, it's as if Robert Henke has plugged XLR cables into the undergrowth for his tenth Monolake album Studio, listening intently to the Earth's shifting movements and wrestling them into song. Synths drip and echo in cavern settings, percussion is highly physical and materially evocative, tracks embark on odysseys through mercurial sonic landscapes; everything is purposefully detailed and acutely mixed. It's a laser focussed, microscopic view on his musical surroundings and inner world, and an ode to the creative shelter that has given the Ableton software co-founder the space and grace to freely experiment over the years.

The album has undergone countless variations and developments, reflected in tracks that morph and twist as they move along, like the pointillist beats of ‘The Elders Disagree’ finetuned into complex layers. It's evidence of an artist labouring for months on their machines to get just the right sound. The track brews in tension with metallic springy rushes and growls, choir like synths stabbing rather than singing, grainy sighs and liquid pips and pops, all thrumming with an earthen heartbeat in a crisp and organic sonic palette.

‘Thru Stalactites’ multiplies those scattered percussive layers tenfold, taking “industrial techno” literally with a flurry of whirring mechanics, utilising a toolbelt of intricately patterned, clunking sounds. The bassline strolls, struts, and murmurs underneath the downpour of nuts and bolts and gurgling synths, as the track feverishly reconfigures these sequences in a heady headspin of production prowess. ‘Signals’ is similarly expressive, its crackling explosions in miniature carbonated like soda and ecstatic in the sense of atoms whizzing and colliding into each other. Like many tracks here, there's a static electric magic in the air, cast by atmospheric synth drones and rebounding plucks that twitch, spit, and jitter.

Compared to previous albums Archaeopteryx and VLSI, Studio is staggeringly maximal, both in scope and sound. Henke is pushing a hypercharged electronic orchestra through swampy bubbling lows and celestial sugary highs. The barrage of drums and molten bass on ‘Cute Little Aliens’ conjures an otherworldly landscape, with tidal pool washes and glitching extraterrestrial language, while ‘Global Transport’ comes down to Earth with human voices internationally sourced from train announcements and chattering ambience, albeit sliced into speeding micro collages. And as these soundscapes crash and surge with creativity, they're guided by drum machine worshipping dance rhythms, like the skittering beats and thrumming bass of ‘Stasis Field’ evolving into a moody battlefield between brassy space opera melodies and chirping spectral clangs.

After nearly thirty years in the game, it would be easy for Robert Henke to rest on his laurels now. Lucky for us, he refuses to get complacent, as Studio is a refreshing update from one of the true masters in the field. Restlessly evolving, he uses the full length album format to project listeners into colliding dimensions, where attentive repeated listens reveal a deepening trove of rewarding details in one of the finest and most dazzling releases to pass through our ears in 2024.

With his tenth Monolake album becoming a career highlight, Robert Henke follows up Studio to take us on an exclusive grand tour of his impressive discography. It’s been almost thirty years of Monolake, a mainstay in techno and the broader electronic field, and Henke has covered a lot of ground, with collaborators in the project’s initial half including fellow Ableton co-founder Gerhard Behles, and Torsten Pröfrock AKA T++ (AKA labelhead of DIN, AKA various aliases on Chain Reaction, and many more).

Selected Monolake Tracks runs the full spectrum of the artist's prolific output. There’s a lot of technical wizardry and cerebral details to appreciate about these career spanning selections, but what powers this mix is the absolute club thump of it all. The opening ‘Stratosphere’ from 2003’s Momentum wastes no time getting started, charging full speed ahead with its train track rhythms into tunnelling underground ambience, joined by fluctuating sparks and bass resonating like knocking steel pipes. Travel two decades into the future and you have the equally evocative ‘Prime Lundy’ from 2024’s Studio, clacking and coiling in all directions with abstract factory type percussion.

Across the tracklist’s timespan there’s mechanic beats and brooding industrial ambience, murky Berlin takes on UK garage and film score inspired, dub infused synthwave. That kind of materiality and experimentation is what makes a mix like this so exciting. Monolake often magnifies the micro sounds for dense layers that sweep the full frequency range, manifesting as a horde of locust like clicks forming a downpour on ‘Atomium’ as celestial bells toll beneath the four to the floor, or ‘Tangent I’, completely liquid in all aspects: molten bass, trickling ambience, acid ping ponging synths, and swishing beats.

It’s a marvel how tracks from across three decades weave so seamlessly into each other; not only has Monolake clearly evolved across these years, but kept consistently boundary pushing. A very highly recommended selection from one of our favourite artists here at Bleep.

Squarepusher - Dostrotime

Whether composing Music For Robots with 78 fingers, performing with Shobaleader One, or exacting the drum and bass carnage his three decade career is prized for, Tom Jenkinson presents exhilarating experiments in a stoic yet playful manner. But as with any album bearing the “Made In Lockdown” tag, it's hard not to attribute emotionality to the latest Squarepusher offering, Dostrotime. Free from the schedule of his cancelled Be Up A Hello tour and the squall of human activity, Jenkinson spent the following 2020 in the studio brewing up some of his most intense material yet.

Monolake - Studio

The studio can be a site for many things: peace, chaos, intense focus, spur of the moment improvisation, experimentation, surprise. Techno visionary Robert Henke returns to his Monolake alias and Imbalance Computer Music label after four years with his creative space in mind, distilling all it contains into an absolute masterclass in mind bending, world building, cinematic sound design and electronica.

Iglooghost - Tidal Memory Exo

No one builds a world like Iglooghost. Tapping into the history of UK raves and pirate radio stations, his third full length album Tidal Memory Exo conjures the image of a free party held in grimy overcast shoals populated by fossilised false gods. Moving on from the entity-summoning laptop folk of Lei Line Eon, Iglooghost assumes the form of an MC broadcasting illegal tunes from a rusted oil rig, stepping ever so confidently into grimy rap and alluvial flows in these seafaring pirate transmissions.

Still House Plants - If I don't make it, I love u

After a decade of friendship, and finally writing music in the same room together, Still House Plants are completely locked in on their third album If I don’t make it, I love u. It’s as if they’re cerebrally connected, never faltering through accelerating stop start rhythms and decelerating molten, elastic tempos. That level of synergy is the result of years spent honing and rehearsing their performances: following the band's earlier tapes on Scottish label GLARC, Long Play stretched its limbs as the trio felt out the LP format, before breaking all of its rules with the innovative Fast Edit.

Jlin - Akoma

Seven years since her last full length, Bleep’s 2017 album of the year Black Origami, Jlin is back to melt minds with her latest batch of dextrous compositions. That fateful ‘Erotic Heat’ drop on Bangs & Works Vol. 2 set up over a decade of innovation in the name of footwork, followed by a score for Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography, AI collaborations with Holly Herndon, and Pulitzer shortlisted compositions for Third Coast Percussion, but on her third album Akoma, Jlin pushes far beyond genre with her most significantly evolved and staggeringly impressive work to date.

Kim Gordon - The Collective

Kim Gordon has watched very closely where the spirit of punk has moved over the decades since first harnessing it in the 80s with Sonic Youth, and has morphed accordingly on her second solo album The Collective, folding bass-worshipping trap rhythms into her overdriven guitar palettes. Rock and hip hop have a historic relationship, all the way back to the early days of Run-DMC, and as Sonic Youth collaborated with the likes of Cypress Hill and Chuck D of Public Enemy, it seems an almost blindingly obvious decision for Kim Gordon to bring hip hop's modern sounds back into her foray thirty year later.

KMRU, Kevin Richard Martin - Disconnect

Both ever prolific and having skirted each other’s realms of ambience, drone, and heavily textured sound design, Kevin Richard Martin and Joseph Kamaru seem like the perfect pair. Their first collaborative work and first release for both in 2024, Disconnect synthesises their abilities in “a powerful study of dread, hope, and profound sonics” stretched across three “core moments”. Martin’s dark dub-infused soundscapes and eroded textures meet Kamaru’s penchant for creating liminal space from field recordings and sonic experimentation, with Kamaru’s own voice awash in the dense soundscapes.

Hainbach - Breve

Hainbach has dedicated much of his career to exploring rare and hard to find instruments, synthesisers and electronic equipment - bringing them back to the forefront of modern electronic production. After repurposing disused nuclear research equipment, and the early 60s Syn-Ket synthesiser in 2023, he turns his sights to an even earlier feat of engineering. His eighth release for Seil Records, Breve focuses on the Ondioline, a proto-synthesiser instrument created by Georges Jenny in 1939 and continuously developed until his death in 1975, and it's a marvellous merging of electronic eras.

Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

Endlessness is a deep dive into the cycle of existence. The 45-minute album delicately spans 10 tracks with a continuous arpeggio playing throughout, creating an expansive, mesmerizing celebration of life cycles and rebirth. Following Nala Sinephro’s critically acclaimed debut album Space 1.8, Endlessness further elevates Sinephro as a transcendent and multi-dimensional composer, beautifully morphing jazz, orchestral, and electronic music.

Sophia - SOPHIE

Six years after her landmark debut album Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, and three years after her tragic passing, SOPHIE's triumphant legacy is crystallised in her surprise self-titled second album. It's far from an exaggeration to say SOPHIE's inimitable approach to sound design and constructing dance pop smash hits has revolutionised modern music, and with this album close to completion before her passing, we get an exciting glimpse of evolution from an artist who revitalised the electronic landscape.