Unlike most of my other compositions, Monument was composed completely linear from beginning to end by gradually layering material onto analog 8 track tape, without following a pre-conceived form plan. Granular Synthesis is usually applied to generate very long and slowly changing textures, but within Monument very rapid successions of short granular based timbres occur quite often as well.

When somewhere in 1990 I accidentally encountered the sound world of Granular Synthesis (I heard an example coming through the door of Sonology's computer studio while walking on the corridor), its quality struck me immediately. At that time, only an experimental version of the software by Barry Truax was running on the old PDP-11 / DMX-1000 computer configuration, and no one seemed really interested. When I started searching, I discovered that a lot of resource material from Truax was just lying there, waiting to be used. Step by step I started to compile the whole POD system that contained both synthesis models and algorithmic compositional tools. The Granular program turned out to be a part of that system.

Monument is the result of one month of continuous work in the summer of 1991. The piece was premiered at the occasion of the 1992 Sound & Space festival in Stockholm, Sweden.

Paul Berg was very helpful.