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Monotonprodukt 07 [27y++]

Monoton

… humid jungles teeming with infinitesimal details and tiny incident. — The Wire, UK

A long awaited re-issue of LP: “Monoton: Monotonprodukt 07” (MonotonProdukt 1982). Monoton is Viennese media, light and sound artist Konrad Becker. His second album “Monotonprodukt 07,” a double, is so alive with the pulses that triggered many Electronicas to come, from Techno through Trance to Mego’s creeping static, you could make a case for Becker’s guruhood. Yet, for all its prescient washed out tones, threadbare textures and Minimalist rigour, it has the edge on much that followed. Adopting an imperious art stance towards mainstreams and margins alike, Becker cast a cold analytic eye over Electronica’s urfathers, picking up on Suicide’s jittertronic urgency, if not their melodrama, and DAF’s throbbing sequencers, but with the sex threat removed, which he patched into his own crackling circuits, hissing vistas and tumbling beatstreams. His dryness cannot entirely suppress a likeable goofiness: “Fish lives in water-thirsty.” —BK

CD (ORAL 32, 2009)

  • Label: Oral
  • ORAL 32
  • 2009
  • Total duration: 67:17
  • 120 mm × 150 mm × 3 mm
  • 25 g

On the web

2 × LP vinyl (ORAL 52, 2012)

Side A

Side B

Side C

Side D

  • Label: Oral
  • ORAL 52
  • 2012
  • Total duration: 67:17
  • 315 mm × 315 mm × 8 mm
  • 455 g
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In the press

Boomerang

Phillip Sherburne, The Wire, no. 231, April 1, 2003

Even more crucial early European electronica comes in the form of Austrian Monoton’s Monotonproduct 07 20y++ (ORAL 02), a reissue of 1982’s Monotonprodukt 07 which was chosen as one of the “100 Records That Should Have Set The World On Fire While No One Was Listening” in The Wire 175. Well, clearly at least one person was listening, a fact borne out by a brief catalogue of all the music this record anticipated: Pan Sonic, Richie Hawtin, Main, Ryoji Ikeda, Pole, Taylor Deupree, CoH, Lustmord, etc, etc. Monoton was artist and hypermedia explorer Konrad Becker, and his music covers the terrain his nom de disque would lead you to expect. Interested in “the interrelation of mathematics, vibrations and psychosomatics”, Becker took his synths and sequencers on a journey through pulse, hiss, static, gravity, repetition and the Fibonacci sequence. While full of minimalist rigour and laboratory sterility, Monotonproduct 07 20y++ is more than just a mathematical inquiry into the nature of sound waves and perception. With Becker’s disembodied intoning against flickering analogue oscillations, certain tracks resemble Suicide at their most morose, while others are humid jungles teeming with infinitesimal details and tiny incident.

… humid jungles teeming with infinitesimal details and tiny incident.
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