- "Surround sound... whatever happened to it?," asked Aleksi Perälä when I interviewed him last year. "Why aren't we getting all our music in surround sound?" This month's Leisure System, at which Perälä performed, suggested a more local version of the same question: given Berghain's immersive six-speaker setup, why doesn't it stage surround sound events more often?
My first encounter with Perälä's extraordinary Colundi Sequence project was in this very room, when he performed at a CTM event last year. This time around, Perälä, the first of three artists to give the reconfigured system a workout, was on a temporary stage to the right of the dance floor, sending his trademark microtonal scales billowing out of the speakers like silk. Perälä has broadened the Colundi sound since last year, lightening its spooky moods with tender moments and detouring from icy techno into broken-beat and electro. The diversity was welcome, though in moments where the drums overpowered the melodies it felt like Perälä had forgotten what makes his music unique. The set's highlights came not through thumping bodily impact, but from delicate cascades of frequencies that set the skin and eardrums tingling. Perälä's talk of Colundi's healing properties might seem far-fetched, but in these moments you could see what he meant.
His use of the surround sound was so subtle as to be undetectable; Max Cooper, who followed him, took the opposite approach. The British producer explored the effect's extremes, setting drum parts in spatial counterpoint, shooting turbulent FX around the room, or deconstructing his compositions into swirling particulate clouds. These big gestures were perfectly suited to his music, a grandiose tour through various overcooked styles: saccharine indie electronica, post-Border Community prog, Autechre glitch-funk. By now the room was packed and happy, responding vocally to the electronica equivalent of a blockbuster spectacle. I was reminded of the time I saw Avatar in 3D: part of me marvelled at the slick presentation, whilst the rest objected to the crude manipulation of my emotions. It was virtuosic music, but it all felt too easy.
Which made Monolake's set a perverse sort of relief. His compositions were anything but easy, their knotty rhythms and protean synth gloop refusing to settle into stable techno forms. The spatialisation conspired with the late hour and the booze to make his music bewildering and intense. If surround sound is to become more present in clubs—as the rise of entities like 4D Sound suggests—then Monolake's music hints at a style native to the medium, a strange new zone where the brainy and the bodily meet.