Looking Outwards: 04

I really like the album Monolake Silence, by Robert Henke. The premise of the album is to create sound, but also a statement about how we currently listen to sound. Instead of working with different levels of compression and mixing, the entire cast of instruments has been set to the maximum at all times. This is because the way we listen to music in the modern world has changed. Instead of creating music with dynamics or elaborate compositions, current laptop, phone, and radio speakers are tuned to sound best when the music is mixed as loud as possible. This means that when songs of more dynamic genres are played, such as classical music, it sounds nowhere near as well as it might if it had been recorded live or if you were listening through headphones. In the final form you can very clearly tell that every track it at it’s maximum, but the arrangements have been left bare in that there are not too many instruments at a single time, such that we can hear all of the noises despite their volume.