Newly remastered and reissued (first time on vinyl), Monolake’s third album was largely a Robert Henke solo album, as co-founder Gerhard Behles had recently left the fold to focus on more software-related concerns. Notably, Behles & Henke were two-thirds of the team that created Ableton Live, which first became commercially available the same year that Gravity was released (2001). Given that Monolake’s debut Hongkong had already been an instant dub-techno classic on the iconic Chain Reaction label (metal box and all), Henke was essentially living at the cutting edge of both technology & electronic music at this stage of his career. Appropriately, he managed to effortlessly transcend most of the tropes of his dub-techno peers with this release, expertly steering the project into something that managed to be playful, exacting, futuristic, and deeply evocative all at once.
Field/Imbalance
Notably, Henke’s studio at this time was on the 9th floor of a building overlooking Berlin, which definitely seems to have inspired the “rainswept city at night” impressionism, though Gravity’s sense of voyeuristic detachment feels more akin to a lonely train ride home at 3am through a shifting landscape of blurred neon lights and darkly looming buildings. Hallucinatory nocturnal vibes aside, Henke is a goddamn sorcerer at sound design and production, so the wonderfully vivid and vibrant sounds and textures here enhance his insomniac vision beautifully.
The heart of the album is unquestionably the murderers’ row of “Ice,” “Frost, and “Static.” In “Ice,” Henke sensuously combines uneasy ambient drift, panning whispered voices, the stilted funkiness of an Afrobeat lick, and a wonderfully hissing, popping, and rolling beat to evoke the sensation of a dreamlike night drive through an empty city. “Static,” on the other hand, is a bit closer to classic Chain Reaction terrain, but Henke enhances the formula with a muscular, lurching beat and dynamically varying chord washes that feel like slow-motion waves crashing on a rocky shore. That said, “Frost” is the album’s clear masterpiece for me, as Henke unleashes a rolling and propulsive industrial rhythm that mesmerizingly bounces, tumbles, rolls, and pans around spatially in a bleary haze of eerie ambiance. This album is pure headphone nirvana.
