Vienna, ca. 1980: In the pioneering multimedia atmosphere of these years, Konrad Becker had already begun to spin a broad net of activities that allowed him to try out medium after medium, resonance chamber after resonance chamber. As an actor, painter, experimental filmmaker and, finally, musician, he embodied, more than almost any other artist in the scene at the time, the model of the »edgy all-round artist«, one that was to be flogged to death in the »Nuwäf« years that were then just beginning. Punk and Wave acts had been called in to perform in the city early on, and the first, mostly epigonic groups had been founded. But it was some time before a few radical, conceptual musical projects were to stir up the archaeological depths of the Sound of Vienna.

One of these projects was Monoton – and it exerts a subliminal influence to this day. It stood almost alone in its anticipation of recent techno-minimalist trends, foredating them by a good fifteen years. This is Minimal Trance, produced on the mini synthesizers, sequencers and other electronic effect devices that had then just become practicable and affordable. There were some distant echoes from the »Krautrock« seventies to be heard in the tightly constructed Monoton sound. But otherwise, the only parallels were with the »darker« and »dubbier« Wave and Industrial experiments from Great Britain. »Genuine Germanic electronics, not the ersatz Ultravox variety« is what the »New Musical Express« wrote back then. It is also no wonder that »The Wire« put the double album »Monotonprodukt 07«, issued in 1982 and long unavailable, on its list of the »100 records that set the world on fire«, published in 1998, as if this were a matter of course. This mention may well have inspired the current re-issue on CD by the Canadian label Oral, the musical home of the Montreal Mutek Festival (http://www.oral.qc.ca).

Becker started up Monoton in 1979 with changing musical partners (mostly Eugenia Rochas and Albert Griemann). It operated according to a »subjectless« product and label philosophy, designed rigorously down to the last detail, like that which informed the pioneering enterprises of the time (such as Factory, Fast and Fetish). The above-mentioned double album, which even today gives the »Wire« journalists goose bumps, appeared in 1982, following the first LP »Monotonprodukt 02«, the single »Ich weiß nichts« (Monotonprodukt 04, 1981) and various cassette productions. »Monotonprodukt 07« is stringently designed, from the black/white cover with its blocked-out musical stave to the innermost essence of the music, and delivers an even cooler and more abstract minimal sound than its predecessors. Perhaps even Brian Eno, himself the father of ambience explorations of an extremely polar nature, would have experienced a Teutonic shiver in the face of its microtonal oscillations and trancelike vibrance. Pieces like »Tanzen und Singen« and »Wasser«, which each take up half a side, indulge in beguiling, endless repetitions of simple, objective statements (»A fish swims in water«), and set off the reverb-charged sequencer loops with minimal percussion support. A rejection of the temporal linearity that characterised conventional pop and rock songs is very much in the foreground, as is the instrumental Industrial beat that frequently occurs, tying in very well with the apocalyptic mood that was rife in the early eighties.

And yet, in all of this, an enduring vitalistic spark flashes out. In the accompanying text, Becker wrote »We experience the physical existence of life as vibration, rhythmus and light,« thus placing Monoton in the transitional area of »mathematics, vibration research and psychosomatics.« He explored these connections for a while under the aliases »Die wissenschaftliche Sensation« (The Scientific Sensation) and »Gesellschaft für Wissenschaft & Volkstanz« (Society for Science & Folk Dance”), then gradually turned his attention to the burgeoning Techno and Net culture (see his project »public netbase«, http://www.t0.or.at/t0). But that was not before working on Monoton projects such as the »eight-hour-long dismantling of the sound barrier« (June 1981 in the Virgil Chapel under Vienna’s Stephansdom) and intensively invoking the » factor« at a special »Frequency Conference« (April 1982).

»Monotonprodukt 07«, the current CD version with the Techno suffix »20y++«, makes some of these border-breaking experiments available again in their studio versions. Twenty years of ice-cold audio archive have done little harm to the sound.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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