Monolake Live - The Ghosts In Surround Tour

THURSDAY 1st MARCH 2012
with support from Craig Richards & Peverelist

On the first evening of March, Robert Henke will be bringing his Ghosts in Surround Tour to Room One as part of a multi dimensional, immersive audio and visual experience. The tour comes as Henke releases ‘Ghosts’, the 9th studio album to be released under the Monolake moniker, which is set for release on 27th February through his own Imbalance Computer Music label. The entirety of the album was composed in Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation that Henke, a true advocate of the possibilities of technology, himself helped develop.

The Ghosts In Surround tour marks a new stage of the Monolake Live Surround Project which began in 2009 when Henke started collaborating with visual composer Tarik Barri. As the title of the show suggests the live performance is presented in surround sound alongside Barri’s advanced real time generative video, creating a new level of sonic and visual immersion. Henke uses multiple channels of audio and computer animations and places the listener in a deep, wide field of sound that is much bigger than the physical room defined by the speakers and the walls.

The project is an extension of the ideas laid down by Henke in the essay ‘Live Performance in the Age of Super Computers’, and it’s his way of responding to an issue hotly debated among the electronic music sphere regarding the ultimate quality of a laptop performance compared to one that utilizes the analogue hardware that the genre was born from. Using the Live software he helped refine the live performance will find Henke manipulating sounds into bouts of precisely crafted lush soundscapes, wall shaking beats and, more importantly, that deep enveloping bass whilst the visuals will keep you rooted in the experience of it.

“For ‘Ghosts’ I tried out a lot of new things, new ways to create and transform sounds as I spend a lot of time thinking about structure,” Henke says of the show. “The big challenge now is how I can bring all of this to the stage in a beautiful way. Unlike in film, where surround sound follows clear rules, exploring space in a club context is a very different challenge. I want to do more than to just be throwing sounds around the audience. Things are supposed to make sense in a narrative way, too. ”

The Bristol based Punch Drunk Records boss, Peverelist, has been called upon to provide DJ support - his broken blend of sounds echo the expanse of Monolake’s own production palette - alongside our resident Craig Richards, who’s a much charted lover of Henke’s level of inventiveness and progression through his regular Nothing Special pursuits. This event will allow Richards to explore the more experimental side of his record collection, as he ably segues from performance to dancefloor and vice versa.

tickets: fabriclondon.com
doors: 9pm – 2am
price: £12.50 advance

ROOM ONE:
Monolake, Craig Richards, Peverelist