“Hi Sharif, please get in touch with me as soon as you can. Things got a bit out of hand here and I need to talk.
“Don’t use the mobile phone, simply come by and tell the guard you’re bringing in replacement parts for the solar panel. Don’t come after sunset and don’t take the northern entrance. You know where to find me.”
So concludes a disquieting piece of short fiction written by Robert Henke to accompany Ghosts, his new album as Monolake. The text and the music, Henke says, are two different “windows to a bigger drama”.
The eighth Monolake full-length to date, and the first since 2009′s pensive Silence, Ghosts is a shattering piece of work. The title of the album was the first thing to come to Henke; the word ‘Ghosts’ appealed not because of any one meaning, but because of its manifold associations and connotations. He began to think of the sounds he was creating in the studio as ”whimsical little creatures, potentially mean or helpful spirits”, phenomena operating at the edge of human perception.
“Don’t come after sunset and don’t take the northern entrance. You know where to find me.”
Ghosts is a seance of sorts, but it’s no hushed affair; on the contrary, it’s a reaffirmation of Henke’s enduring love of bold dance music structures. The title track recalls the darkly imperious jungle-techno of early Ed Rush and Exorcise The Demons-era Source Direct, while ‘Lilith’ is an unusually vivid but essentially unreconstructed drum ‘n bass roller, and ‘Hitting The Surface’, ‘Afterglow’ and ‘Discontinuity pick up the steppers’ techno thread running through the classic Monolake duo LPs, Interstate (1999, with Gerhard Behles) and Polygon Cities (2005, with Torsten ‘T++’ Profrock). These dynamic rhythm tracks are all the more powerful and persuasive for being placed in the context of eerier, more exploratory compositions like ‘Phenomenon’ and ‘Taku’.
Ghosts is released on February 27, and Henke is about to embark on his Ghosts In Surround tour, in which he’ll be presenting the music of Ghosts in immersive surround sound with suitably hallucinatory visual accompaniment from Tarik Barri; confirmed dates include a show at London’s Fabric on March 1 with support from Peverelist.
Haunted by the prospect of it all, FACT’s Tim Purdom spoke to Henke about the artist’s fascination with with forces from beyond.
Why do you think ghosts exert such a hold over the imagination, even those of people who don’t believe in the ghost as a supernatural phenomenon?
“We humans are very, very odd constructions. We have the ability to think about ourselves; we are going to die, and we’re aware of this. Quite an evil construction, actually…we understand and can manipulate how we feel, we can enjoy our lives, we are able to give joy or suffering to other people, but we are still totally at the mercy of something that is absolutely beyond of our control: death. How to cope with this? Religion, mythologies, rituals, drugs, ghosts.”
I’m intrigued by the text (“How I hate those dirty little flies…”) you’ve written to accompany Ghosts.
“The text on Ghosts is a fragment of a longer story yet to be written. An older fragment comes with the last album, Silence. A third text which I already wrote, will be part of the next album, the working title of which is Escape. The three texts are all connected to of a longer story that I have in mind. I often write little things, independently of my music, but sometimes music inspires the writing or the other way round. The text on Ghosts I wrote after I made the first track, which gave me an idea about the topic of the album. I suddenly had a vision of how it all could fit together.
“When working on more music later I used the text as as a guide. I also started scanning through my photos. So basically the text and the design were ready long before the music was finished. The suggested relationship between the music and the writing is a loose chain of possible associations. I leave it to the listener to figure out how things are connected. Some connections are obvious, others are not so apparent.”
“We are still totally at the mercy of something that is absolutely beyond of our control: death.”
It’s not uncommon for sound, and the creation of sound, to be described using the language of ghosts (spectral, haunting, phantasmagoric, seance-like, etc). Why do you think this connection at the metaphoric level is so often made?
“Music, especially when purely instrumental, is a very ghostly form of art in itself. There is no explicit meaning, there is room for thoughts to wander. Also, music has the power to produce trance-like mental states and therefore often plays essential roles in shamanic rituals, religious ceremonies and in all kinds of drug-related contexts. Music creates non-existing spaces and populates it with all sorts of magic objects. And, of course the creational process of computer-generated music itself is a very bodiless and ghostly experience, similar to the mysterious appearance of an image on photographic paper when exposed in the darkroom.”
You mention in the note on your website that you developed considerable skills as an ersatz foley artist in the making of this album. Have you ever worked in that world – recording for film, TV, radio – or had any desire to do so?
“I studied sound engineering for film and I worked as sound designer for a theatre for a while. The main reason I didn’t end up in this movie industry was my profound aversion to current German TV culture and the lack of interesting films being made. However, quite a bit of my musical ideas or inspirations on how to work with sound come from that background.”
Pages: 1 2