Monos – Generators CD ICR DISTRIBUTION

Standard 2CD edition  on Die Stadt Comes in attractive gatefold card sleeve with artwork from Darren Tate & Helen Potter.

Electronics, field recordings & mixed by Darren Tate & Colin Potter.     Design by Jonathan Coleclough

Few records have the severity of depth that this one carries with it: developing and fluid in its every contour, ever-present, but always hiding behind the shape of a shadow. There is no resting point, no sound or simple feeling that these four pieces lean on in order to carry out their miles-deep melancholy.

Monos (aka Darren Tate and Colin Potter) are intent on relaxing muscle and slowing brain activity to a crawl. The hum of electronics blows easily until random sounds bolt through the still waters of the track. Slowly developing melodic themes stretch from their slumber and begin a slow crawl through the lamp-lit streets that are at the very heart of “Generators”.

This is a dream record through and through…. everything awash with dark undulations, like the movement of the ocean. The slow, deliberate pulse of the album delivers a suffocating atmosphere with a strange sense of density.

Ltd x 600 copies in a spot-varnished digisleeve.

Review by Soundohm : As “Sleep” begins there is a suggestion made, a hypnotic motion meant only to seduce the mind into the belief that Darren Tate and Colin Potter are intent on relaxing muscle and slowing brain activity to a crawl. The hum of electronics blows easily until random sounds—coughing, restlessness, twisting and turning—bolt through the still waters of the track. Slowly developing melodic themes, almost too distant to piece together, stretch from their slumber and begin a slow crawl through the lamp-lit streets that are at the very heart of Generators. This is a dream record through and through. All around is an environment of places and the energy they emit: a spider crawling along its web musically, the unearthly buzz of fluorescent light, a lone figure standing still beneath it, everything awash with dark undulations, like the movement of the ocean. The slow, deliberate pulse of the album delivers a suffocating atmosphere with a strange sense of density. The sounds slowly congeal, pressed by gravity and necessity, to a mass that is ultimately crushing. As “Slowly Fading” slips away into silence, there is a mood left behind that cannot be lifted easily. The whole of the 2nd CD, entitled “The Black Sea,” is a radiant bubbling of all that dark material, the introverted dreamscape of the 1st CD, made flesh and blood. Printed inside this beautiful gate-fold case is the word “still.” Generators does exhibit a stillness, a strange freeze frame of moments inundated with uncomfortable thoughts, but it achieves this effect with variation as its mantra. The howling, moaning, wind-blasted end carries with it a sense of illusion that has every scene suddenly infused with shock and tense silence. Generators lives up to its name, conducting a psychological, frozen horror in its progression. The simplest image, like that of an orange hanging from a tree, becomes loaded and awkward under this album’s impression.