Bleep

Gravity is the first Monolake album to be an almost entirely solo affair from Robert Henke, and crystallises the sound that Henke has been refining over two decades since. After the classic debut Hongkong with Gerhard Behles, Monolake began diving into more active, fluctuating dub techno rhythms in the duo’s minimal yet evocative soundscapes; on Gravity, Henke gets to the core of it, delighting in crafting intricacies to inhabit the album’s dense atmospheres.

“I like this idea of music as something which could go on forever, like a sculpture in time,” Henke said a year after the release. That idea rings true throughout Gravity, introduced with an imaginative stretching of machinery in ‘Mobile’ as metallic thuds accelerate, and liquid glitches bubble, gurgle, and squelch, descending further into reverberant waterdrop melodies. With titles like ‘Ice’ and ‘Frost’, there’s plenty of associative imagery one could apply to these sound sculptures, but Henke really embeds it in the album’s sonic physicality, evoking plumes of breath with computerised speech, balancing textures between smooth glacial surfaces and the crunchy, dampened rhythms of snow.

Much as the album’s jittery chirps and forceful beats evidence glorious technical nerdery, it’s rightly noted that Gravity’s warmth granted it staying power over the “overly sterile digital music released in the early 2000s”. Amidst the pulverising rhythms of ‘Static’ and murmuring sub bass of ‘Aviation’ are the lush, subtly bitcrushed pads of ‘Zero Gravity’, which contrasts crisp, skittish, pinprick percussion with thudding and tumbling effects. The gaseous turbulence of ‘Nucleus’ is a prime example of Henke’s “pure atmospheric structures”: having breached escape velocity, the closing track hurtles into the wondrous, dusty expanse of space, tender with almost ten minutes of ceaseless shuddering in the glistening stillness.