Monolink – The Beauty Of It All

It begins with silence.

So quiet, in fact, that for a few seconds you wonder whether you’ve accidentally pressed mute. But wait – now a single note taps gently against the speaker cones. A brief sound in spartan solitude, produced by one finger pressing a synthesizer key, growing louder through subtly arrhythmic repetition. Then Steffen Linck’s voice enters the acoustic picture: that familiar, sorrowful, melancholy tenor typical of singer-songwriters, burdened by the hardships of the present age. Just as you’re about to stop the CD – suffering, as you do, from a recurring allergy to melancholy singer-songwriter fare – instead of the expected depressive acoustic guitar, a modern, highly stripped-down Jean-Michel Jarre-style synth opus unfolds. Okay, you think, allowing the CD to continue spinning, this is interesting.

It may well be that the name Steffen Linck is unfamiliar to many people. It certainly was to me. And, in the interest of honesty, his stage name Monolink wasn’t familiar either. One thing can be inferred from this: you are probably not among those who shake their bones at Burning Man with ecstasy in their bloodstream or spend good money so you can dance into the sunrise on Ibiza. Still, I rather enjoy this kind of thing – the dynamic dramaturgy of house music, the ebb and flow of digital sound cascades, the melodic play of bits and bytes. I once discussed a work by Paul Kalkbrenner in this space, for example. And now we’re moving in similar sonic territory. Steffen Linck, aka Monolink, born in Hamburg and – of course – based in Berlin, is one of the more in-demand live dancefloor artists – not yet as big as Kalkbrenner, but pursuing an exciting artistic approach all his own: the fusion of electronic dance and trance music with acoustic pop.

His third album, The Beauty Of It All, released last autumn and is probably the ideal reference point for our “Zündstoff” column. From shy, minimalist keyboard notes to gentle vocal power (the melancholy gradually washes away from song to song), from booming drum-and-bass bombast to the dirty, abrasive electric guitar at the heart of the album, Monolink has created a work that has legitimate groove and, crucially, thrives on its variety of nuances and facets.

The album unfolds track by track like a carefully choreographed DJ set – with quiet passages, breathless bursts of sound, and above all, gradually building dancefloor beats pulsing to the rhythm of a heartbeat. The sounds come primarily from digital equipment, supplemented by analog drums (played on “Perfect World” by Severin Kantereit, co-founder and drummer of AnnenMayKantereit; elsewhere by Monolink producer Toby Siebert, who has also worked with Phillip Boa and the Voodoo Club and Kettcar) and, of course, Linck’s acoustic and electric guitars.

Exemplifying the album as a whole is the song “Promised Land,” an almost eight-minute ride across vastly different sonic worlds. The work of a postmodern landscape painter, inspired – as you can read in an interview – by Pink Floyd. A vocal track that sounds almost bored, stoically driving drum patterns, and a strangely oriental-toned electric guitar that occasionally screams with metal-heavy intensity evoke many associations: Kalkbrenner’s techno, Tinariwen’s desert blues, and even the Turkish psychedelic rock of Baba Zula. Interestingly, after about four minutes, something like a church organ raises its voice, before the guitar really lets loose – though continuously accompanied by the monotonous rhythm of bassline and drums. I grab the remote – let’s hear this again.