Audiopile Review: Great to see Monolake getting the extensive reissue treatment. As one of the creators of Ableton Live, Monolake’s Robert Henke is among electronic music’s most influential people. But, along with a revolving cast of collaborators, he has also amassed one of electronic music’s most consistently impressive discographies. ‘Gravity’, originally released in 2001, is one of Monolake’s best albums and a fascinating insight into Henke’s artistic development. It all began with the sublime dub-techno of 1997’s ‘Hongkong’ before progressing to the more complex beats of 2005’s ‘Polygon Cities’. After that, it took four years before Henke dropped the never-bettered ‘Silence’. At the time, that album’s electro-acoustic IDM seemed like a major technical and aesthetic quantum leap. But ‘Gravity’ foreshadows many of its innovations, particularly the extensive use of field recordings. There had always been a musique concrète element to Monolake. But, on ‘Gravity’, Henke revealed an extraordinary talent for transmuting everyday sounds into disconcertingly uncanny rhythms and textures. Honestly, if half the folks who use his software had half his imaginative genius…. Uh, we’d be even more overwhelmed by great music than we already are.

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Twenty-four years on from its original release, Monolake’s seminal Gravity receives its first vinyl pressing courtesy of Field Records. Occupying its own space at the intersection of dub techno, minimal and electronica, it’s an ageless album of staggering vision and technological prowess which has matured into an all-time pillar of electronic music. This edition, remastered by the album’s key architect Robert Henke, follows on from the recent reissue of Monolake’s first album, Hongkong.

Arriving just after the turn of the millennium, Gravity marked a turning point for Monolake. With co-founder Gerhard Behles moving on to other ventures, Henke produced most of the album solo and journeyed deeper into spatial exploration and the dub-informed principles that underpinned their project from the start. Minimalism and negative space run through the whole record, from the keen slithers of percussion pinging through lattices of delay to the hypnotising pulse of subliminal basslines anchoring the tracks. Gravity is a record which hangs on techno’s linearity as a form of meditation, but the crystalline clarity of the mix allows every micro-fluctuation in rhythm and sound to cut through.

Compared to a lot of overly sterile digital music released in the early 2000s, Gravity endures thanks to the warmth and texture Henke elicited from his processes — even when leaning into none-more-digital effects like bit reduction. He described the ninth-floor view over Berlin from his studio at night as a key influence on the sound of the record, but the space Gravity shapes out feels thrillingly implacable. Unbound by the standard conventions of time and space, Gravity stands proud as a true original and finally gets the ceremonious vinyl pressing it so richly deserves.