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.
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