Tone Glow 203: Monolake

An interview with Robert Henke about AI, the importance of tedium in the creative process, his 2024 LP 'Studio', and his overlooked 2001 masterpiece 'Gravity'

Monolake

Photo courtesy of the artist

Monolake is the project of Robert Henke (b. 1969), a German producer and artist who also co-created Ableton Live. Monolake originally began in 1995 as a duo act comprised of Henke and Gerhard Behles, the latter leaving the group in 1999 to focus on their software company. Monolake has largely been a solo project since, with Torsten Pröfrock briefly joining during the 2000s. Henke’s music under his own name, as Monolake, and as Helical Scan focuses on different strains of electronic music, though could be primarily described as minimal, ambient, and dub techno—early releases were on the legendary record label Chain Reaction. Monolake has released 11 albums to date, including Hongkong (1997), Interstate (1999), Cinemascope (2001), and Silence (2009). The most recent Monolake album is Studio (2024), and the past few years have seen reissues of older releases, including Gobi. The Desert EP (1999) and Gravity (2001). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Henke via Zoom on May 7th, 2025 to discuss the making of Gravity, the formative artists of his childhood, and artificial intelligence.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know that you come from a family of engineers and that your parents worked at Siemens. What’s the earliest memory you have of being fascinated by the world of engineering?

Monolake: It’s really hard to pin down the earliest memory. My grandfather was an engineer at Siemens, too, and he had a little workshop in his apartment. I remember how carefully he stored his tools—it was important that every screwdriver had a very specific location. Another early memory is that I built loudspeakers with him. This was of course very essential to have so I could listen to music with proper loudspeakers. I was quite young, but I was old enough to appreciate music and to explicitly look for the specific music I liked, so I must have been around 10 or 12.

Do you remember what it was like to make that and to finally play something on them for the first time? Do you remember what you played?

At this time, my access to interesting music was very limited. I must have played whatever was on the radio, and if I was lucky it was Donna Summer or Giorgio Moroder or British synth pop—stuff like that. We’re talking about the mid-80s here.

Given that your parents were engineers, do you feel like there are qualities that you see in them that have rubbed off on you?

That’s an interesting question. I had a really close relationship with my grandfather, who was very important to me, but I didn’t feel so close to my parents. In retrospect, some friends were much more significant to what I’m doing now than my parents. Maybe what I learned from my grandfather was a certain sense of logic, trying to approach problems with an engineering mindset. Like, let’s see how we can nail this down.

From a very early stage, I learned that you could make art with electronics. There is a German artist named Peter Vogel who made electronic sculptures with wires and circuits and loudspeakers. I discovered his work at a big art museum in Munich and I was fascinated to see something like this in a museum because it was clearly technical, and I could understand it from a technical perspective, but at the same time, it was transcendent. It was not a clock or a car—it was a piece of art that didn’t mean anything else. It was just there to create sound and structure time. I thought it was really, really amazing.

Later, I learned that there were artists who used computers to draw graphics, and that fascinated me. There was an artist named Manfred Mohr, who already in the mid-60s had access to a big mainframe computer and a plotter in Paris at the Meteorological Institute, which must have been quite the adventure back in the day. It’s interesting to see the works of these pioneers get further developed and copied and remain influential for many other artists. When I had the chance at school to finally access a computer, I programmed abstract graphics. I didn’t consider doing sound because I considered it too complicated.

Inevitably, I discovered electronic music. It became pretty clear to me that I needed to do something with sound and technology. In my family, the idea of being an artist was very, very alien. The response to that was, “No, nobody is an artist in our family, so forget it.” Becoming a sound engineer was an attempt to navigate both spheres; I studied computer science and sound engineering and it was the logical step for me to get away from engineering for washing machines and to engineer for the arts.

These artists you mentioned, you experienced their work in a physical space. Was it the same for you when you heard electronic music? Did you hear this in a club setting at first, or was it through records at home?

I have a very early memory and, I can’t nail down when it was, but there was a friend of my parents. He was playing Oxygène (1976) or Equinoxe (1978) by Jean-Michel Jarre and I was completely blown away. It really hit me emotionally, and from that moment onwards, I looked for what else was out there. This proved difficult because this was pre-internet, and I didn’t have any friends who were interested in these things. I had to go to mainstream record stores and ask for electronic music. I got recommended all kinds of shit, but I made my usual detour in the ’80s from more fringe-y stuff that was not electronic but that was influenced by electronic music, like Mike Oldfield and Genesis and prog-rock bands who were embracing electronics, and of course Depeche Mode and then Yello. Tangerine Dream became a very big influence. I bought my first Tangerine Dream record because I saw this entire wall of electronic equipment. I had no idea about the music, but I thought if these guys toured with this many electronics and nothing else, it must be interesting—and it was. This was Logos (1982).

For context, what year were you born?

1969, so I’m 56 now.

It’s super exciting to hear you talk about all this. I’m reminded of the Jon Appleton album from 1969. There are tracks where he’s asking people in the airport their thoughts on electronic music. You mentioned earlier the adventure that these early artists must have had when working with computer graphics, but I’m sure it was also super exciting for you to be handling your first Juno as a young person when synths weren’t explored to the extent that they are now.

In retrospect, it was a fantastic world even in the ’90s. Each year, a new technology came out that allowed you to do new things with sounds. The promise of a new type of synthesis was always very motivating. When I first heard granular synthesis run on a big computer system—and spectral manipulation, and all these things that would be impossible to do even 20 years ago on any computer system you could afford—you were able to listen to these things and it was such a ride.

So [original Monolake member] Gerhard Behles studied computer science at the Technical University here in Berlin. There, he had access to a mini computer, which meant that it was the size of a few fridges (laughter). He did some academic synthesizer stuff that you could not do with any commercial tools. I remember the excitement we had when we were sitting at the terminal, typing in a command, and then 20 minutes later we’d get a sound file. We’d press play to listen to it and most of the time it was boring, but sometimes it was great.

Do you think the delay in time, the need to wait, was important?

I think so. I still embrace it, too. The last project where tedium was an essential component was this project I did with computers from the 80s, the CBM 8032 AV, where everything I did had to be coded in assembler. Just being able to get a kick drum out of this computer was a victory. That of course means that when you get a kick drum, you treat it like gold and you’re very careful with where you place it and what type of beat you make with it. I sometimes feel like having access to every possible tool all the time isn’t always a blessing. Stll, I don’t want to go back to these times, and I’m very happy that we have all the things that we have and that I can make music wherever I want with my laptop, and that I can even explore styles that I couldn’t write by myself using AI.

I’m embracing all of these things, but at the same time, I’m also embracing the fact that with some things that are dear to me, part of the joy was the effort I put into making them happen. There’s always this kind of saying, that the younger generation is lazy and don’t want to work, and it’s probably as old as mankind, but if I’m riding my bike and passing by a halfpipe and I see teenagers spending an enormous amount of time—trying and failing constantly—to do their tricks, they’ll eventually defy the law of gravity. People have this desire to push themselves and to expand their limits. It is important that there is a force, that it is difficult. I don’t know if you followed this, but recently the CEO of Suno said that AI is freeing the creative process from tedium. And he got enormous backlash for that. I don’t think it’s black or white, but the idea that something is better because it’s less work is completely flawed.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently with my students using ChatGPT. My goal is to have them recognize the joy that comes in learning. AI completely changes how I structure my class and the assessments I give. I need to find ways for them to enjoy being curious.

Enjoying curiosity—that’s the key. Understanding that every little knowledge you gain opens a door to new knowledge.

You mentioned the use of AI. I’ve read in interviews you’ve done about the joy that comes in great engineering and how the transparency of the construction leads you to understand how everything generates a specific output. I’m wondering how that squares with your use of AI given that people who use it don’t really know how it creates an end product. And I’m wondering how much you’re using AI.

I’m not using it much. I’m experimenting with some of the commercial tools that are out there. And of course there’s machine learning in a lot of tools these days where it’s not obvious how these things are happening, like with stem separation, which is machine learning. It’s a black box—we trained the machine with vocal tracks and we hope that the machine is able to separate the vocals from the rest. We know how it’s working in principle, but we don’t really know how it’s working. This idea of “knowing” shifts. We built systems where we understand their mechanics, but their mechanics require an adjustment of a lot of things that no human person could adjust to get the output.

We have to accept the fact that we don’t understand everything anymore. And if you think about it, you have to ask if it was ever actually so different. You can say you build your own instruments, but I still use parts that I buy somewhere, I still use a transistor and a capacitor and I can’t make my own—I’m not talking about microprocessors. You have to accept the fact that you are creating with building blocks, and everything we do is based on something that someone else has done before. It comes down to a philosophical question of when it becomes unethical. If I’m using a DrumComputer, I use the circuitry that makes a specific sound, and someone decided on the circuitry, so there’s an authorship of these sounds. Someone might also provide a sample library, and there’s an authorship there.

This idea that there is a certain point in time that you can nail down and say you can’t do this anymore is shortsighted. It’s like the old sampling discussion—how many milliseconds can you sample something before it becomes copyright infringement? It’s a helpless attempt at making sure that work is credited or compensated for, but ultimately, it’s complex.

Naturally, I’m thinking of your role in creating Ableton Live, and this relates to what you’re saying about authorship. At what point is this simply a tool that other people can use, and at what point can you relinquish authorship? It’s not like anyone using a synthesizer is going to credit the specific person who decided on different facets that determine the sounds that it generates.

Every synthesizer is a decision for and against a lot of things. The author shines through—that’s very clear. But really, everything we do is always informed by everyone else. You can’t create without other people’s creating. I can’t come up with music without listening to other people’s music. And I think this is fine. Maybe it’s this concept of the individual genius that is questionable. It’s driven by a desire for power and economic wealth rather than artistic considerations. Ultimately, I’ll imitate someone else because I like it, and other people still buy it because they like the imitation, so then maybe something about the imitation is okay. And if the imitation is okay and no one buys it, it’s also okay.

I don’t see the problem that much. I see the problem of the economic survival of the artist, and of course it would be strange if I listened to my music used in a commercial without them asking me first. That is not something I would want because I wouldn’t feel comfortable being associated with the brand, and if the brand sells more products because of my music, I’d feel like I have some moral right to ask for a share. But I would not want to bind this to a specific duration, like oh they used 500 milliseconds so it’s okay, and if they used 505 milliseconds then I’d want my money. It’s more complex than that.

I think it’s okay if we try our best to formalize things and create laws, but we have to be honest with ourselves that there are certain things that are grey. My wish is that people would be both more generous and more forgiving; generous in terms of, okay use this stuff, and forgiving as in, do I sue the person now? What’s the point?

I wanna backtrack a bit to when you were talking about prog rock and your interest in Tangerine Dream. How did these artists impact you and the music you ended up creating? And this may not be direct, but is there anything about these bands that really shaped your understanding of what music could be or what you wanted to do?

They influenced me to a huge extent, and maybe not directly as in I play the same type of melodies, but what all these people and projects had in common was that they tried to find a unique approach to music. There was always a strong personality behind the work and I could feel it. So it was this idea of personal expression, and the fact it was so different yet still appealed to people. There’s so much music, and 90% of what is out there sounds pretty much like everything else—I listen to it and it doesn’t stick. Every now and then I’ll listen to an artist and think, wait a moment, that’s different. And that’s what I’m looking for. Listening to those successful projects in the ’80s gave me the idea—without rationalizing it at that point—that doing something personal and individual was absolutely worth pursuing.

Now I’m thinking about what you said about your family. How did you get to a point where you accepted that you could be an artist given that you had this initial backlash from your parents? Was this something you had to figure out on your own, did you have others who guided you, was it simply because of these bands you were listening to?

It took me a very long time to accept the fact that I, as a matter of fact, was an artist. I always thought of myself as someone who was just doing things. As usual, these things have a lot to do with your surroundings. If you grew up in the context of the art world—let’s say your parents own a gallery or are art collectors—then of course it’s natural to assume that art is something that is of value, that has a market value, that can be sold. I was surrounded by people, especially in the ’90s in Berlin, who were exploring spaces in electronic music as a means of personal expression. But the idea was not driven by the abstract model of creating art, but more so the idea that we’d be exploring these machines to see what they could do. Authorship was not in the foreground. Of course we listened to music we liked, and there were artists whose works we carefully followed—everyone was listening to Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, etc. But to turn this into an understanding that I could be like them… it didn’t occur to me.

I once had a discussion at the Technical University in Berlin. There was this studio for electronic music, which was a very academic and contemporary music-focused place, but I owed the space and the person who was running it, at least from the ’70s to the ’90s, a lot. He was a very knowledgeable person about everything related to electronic music in academia. He hated repetitive and popular music, but I’m forgiving because his knowledge about anything else, from Xenakis to Stockhausen to everything done in electronic music outside the pop world, was massive. I asked him once, “When is someone a composer?” He said, “Well, someone who is creating something is a composer, and someone who is publishing the things they’re doing is a composer. So there are two things: you have to create, and you have to share what you create so that someone in the world has the chance to notice it. And if these two things come together, you’re a composer.”

I found this really remarkable because there were these two parts. There was no mention that you had to earn money, let alone make a living from this. Commercial aspects were completely out of the picture. It was just “do it, share it.” Given that definition, I realized that I was a composer. And that was exciting.

Robert Henke in 1993. Photo by Ulf Buschleb.

How important is the sharing aspect to you, whether it’s making records or performing or creating installations in a public space? You’ve mentioned how much you enjoy the “doing” aspect—you’ve talked about people being excited about exploring what these machines could do—but what about the sharing?

It would be dishonest to say that I don’t care about the reception of my work. I care a lot. Collecting feedback from the outside world is important, and I don’t think there’s any creative person who is not, in one way or another, dependent on external feedback. The more interesting question is, what do you make as a result of this feedback, and which feedback is relevant? Thank god that the older I get, the less I care about quantity. I don’t care if an enormous amount of people like my work or go to my concerts. I care about the few people whose opinions matter to me, the few people who have something interesting to say. And that’s all I can ask for.

But ultimately, when I’m creating I do it for myself. The motivation really comes from within. The motivation is to follow an idea, to see if I can express myself in this very abstract way, and to see if I can nail down a technical idea that creates a sound that is close to what I had in mind. I’m striving for some sort of perfection here, which is clearly informed by my desire to nail it, not my desire to present it to people. If that were the case, there would be shortcuts. And this brings us back to the Suno founder. I’m not interested in shortcuts because shortcuts defeat the purpose of art. If AI is seen as a shortcut, then I’m not interested. It’s the same thing as using sample loops for me because it’s so much fun to make your own drum sounds! It’s so much fun to sequence them! Why should I use a library loop? It’s not that it would feel like it’s cheating, but it would deprive me of something I tremendously enjoy.

The only way that something like AI starts to become interesting is if I don’t use it as a shortcut, but as a means of finding new forms of expression. We can see it in the visual world. People who are doing interesting things with AI are doing it in the visual world because it’s just a tool, and the amount of work that goes into steering the results, polishing the results, merging the results, etc.—all that together ends up being probably the same amount of work as if you were doing it manually. This is the distinction between someone just typing in a random prompt and taking the first result and someone who goes really deep into it and tries to see what the medium has to offer.

You’re saying it’s a mindset thing, ultimately.

Exactly. And it’s a mindset thing with everything in general. Do you employ ghostwriters because your career demands that you have music out there? A friend of mine is actually occasionally ghostproducing for some big-name DJs. I don’t blame that friend because it’s easy money, but the idea that the market demands an idiot—and a DJ who feels they need a ghostwriter to make music is an idiot to me—shows that something is wrong with society because A) it’s not enough to be a good DJ, and B) if you’re a good DJ but can’t produce songs yourself, or don’t have the time to learn, you still feel the necessity to have someone produce something for you. It’d be so damn unsatisfying for me. In the same way, telling AI to write me a Baroque string quartet and then putting the Baroque string quartet on my album—and without mentioning that I didn’t record anything—would be absurd. But asking AI to write the string quartet, doing that 500 times, editing the three best takes to make my own, and then making it clear that it’s been done with AI assistance—or maybe it’ll be obvious because of the sound—is completely fine.

Yeah, and for a lot of these things you can kind of tell when it is AI. There are certain cues, certain sounds.

And that’s when it becomes interesting.

Something that I dislike about a lot of these image tools is that the output is too realistic now. DALL-E was significantly more interesting to me early on when the images it produced were “wrong.” Now that it’s so good, everything that intrigued me about the tool has disappeared. It’s just way more boring.

That would open a philosophical debate about what people want, what people strive for.

All this is super interesting to me because you mentioned the notion of losing our understanding of how things are created. You’ve also talked about how these early musicians you liked had a personal vision. With art, you need to create something distinct and that often comes from straying from typical formulas, and I think about this with younger generations. Part of the reason their music will seem interesting is that they may be so young that they won’t know what the originators of a particular genre were trying to do, or what fans at the time cared about.

I think about this a lot with dub techno. It’s obviously inspired by dub reggae and sound system culture, but nobody is going to mix these two things up. I’m curious what it was like for you when you were first making songs like the ones on the Cyan (1996) 12-inch, or the one you had as Helical Scan, Index (1996). Of course Chain Reaction had their own house style. How did you navigate making music in this style back then? Did you ever think about how people may consider this music sacrilegious to those who were primarily interested in dub reggae?

First of all, I think that we didn’t think that much (laughter). It’s a privilege of youth that you don’t think, or maybe spend time overthinking other things. We were a bunch of friends in a small scene who were mutually influenced by each other. We were actively seeking out collaboration and exchange. Together, we navigated this open landscape and everything is just the result of that. There was no fear of copying each other because we were too unique in our own backgrounds, expressions, and ideas, but we were influenced by each other and it was beautiful. I can definitely say that I was influenced by the early Basic Channel stuff—there was a certain sense of timelessness in the music, like it started somewhere and ended somewhere but you only got to witness an excerpt of it.

The one thing that I found so amazing with techno was that it felt so timeless. Techno is the negation of the traditional song. A song has a beginning and an end, it has lyrics, it has a closed story. Techno is something you can start anywhere and you can end it anywhere, and in the middle, the machine is simply running. This machine has variations to keep it interesting, but it’s completely okay if you take 30 seconds of the song and mix with that because the idea is not that it has to be this 10-minute block—it can be 30 seconds, it can be layered with one layer amongst others, and you can repeat four bars forever. All these manipulations are acceptable within the genre, and I find this very, very beautiful. That kind of thinking was very much present in the music on Gravity (2001).

Yes, I wanted to talk about that album given the reissue. At this point you had already made a bunch of music. Were there things you were doing on this album that were in response to what you had done on your previous records?

No, no—it was just an exploration of tools. The real-time audio extension for Max/MSP came out in mid-1997, and I was an early adopter. In 1999, I was exploring a lot of what I could do with Max and Max/MSP. A lot of the sequencing and a lot of the sound design came from my explorations there. The sequencing on Gravity is all Max patches. These are simple things that permutate slowly. I basically set up machines that ran infinitely and recorded them onto a DAT tape. There was a certain working method that was in favor of these endless tracks.

The other aspect that’s important is my surroundings. They matter a lot. I’m very sensitive to them, for better and worse. If it’s a beautiful sunny day and I’m in my flat, I’m very happy, but if it’s raining and I’m in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere, I’m not happy. I know people who can perfectly ignore both, but I can’t. The environment for making music that I had during this period of time was very special. Right at Berlin Alexanderplatz is the first high-rise building built in the GDR. It’s the Haus des Lehrers, which was used during the GDR period as offices for schools and anything to do with education. It was empty after the Wall came down, and it was rented out to different companies, but they weren’t very successful.

In the late 1990s, this building was empty. A friend of mine used to work for the city government, and at some point he thought, this is such a waste of space—this is such a beautiful building with beautiful offices, and it’d be a perfect workspace for small, creative industries. Sometimes it just takes one person to have an idea, and he convinced the city government to do this. He rented out six or seven floors to small businesses, and I rented my space there that I used as a studio. This space was on the ninth floor overlooking Alexanderplatz, overlooking this big street where, on the other side, there was a huge neon Panasonic advertisement that changed colors. When it was winter, there was a very Blade Runner-esque feeling there. So in this building there was this feeling, and I could be infinitely loud there at night because nobody was there, and if there were any other people, they’d be fine with it. I was surrounded by other creative people on my floor—there was a font designer, a book illustrator, an architect. We always met in the small kitchen, had a small coffee together, and went back to our little offices. Our doors were always open so we could walk in and see what other people were doing. That was the environment in which this album was created.

That sounds so ideal. There was so much freedom there, and it’s always nice to be around other people with their own creative pursuits. Just knowing there are other people in your vicinity doing that can do so much. You mentioned that it felt like you were in Blade Runner, which makes me think of two tracks: “Nucleus,” which is the ambient closer, and “Frost,” which has a very cinematic quality to it. And it’s because of the humming synth pad that hovers over everything while the kicks stay active. I know that you also studied sound engineering for film.

Right, and it was mostly a waste of time.

Why do you say that?

It made it very clear to me that I didn’t want to be in the German film industry.

Why is that?

(laughs). Well, it was very ego-driven and there were many ideas about aesthetics that were different from mine.

That’s interesting to hear because I’d assume that your experiences would’ve been helpful for the music on this album and others. You use field recordings and such, you’re thinking about atmosphere.

There’s a reason I decided to study it. I thought it would be a good idea, but it turned out in practice that it wasn’t. A few good friendships have remained from that time, and I learned a few things, but in the end, it only made clear what I didn’t want to do.

I wanted to ask about the song “Ice” and the whispered voice on it. Can you talk about that?

This is very nerdy. There are two things coming together here. MacOS introduced speech synthesis with, I think, System 7. This must have been around ’95. There were a few voices that were really interesting, and one of the voices that caught my attention was one called “Whisper.” This is one where the stuff that is normally a fixed frequency is replaced by a noise source, therefore you get this whispering voice. I always liked the fact that a computer whispering is a nice contradiction. The intended use of this voice is text-to-speech, where you have text and you have this computer read it to you. At the time, I was using Max/MSP for almost everything, and it’s a [visual] programming language, mainly—you draw boxes and connections—but the underlying format in which it’s actually saved is text. You can open a Max patch in a text editor. The computer voice is speaking the beginning of the Max patch I used to synthesize the song! It’s very self-referential.

What’s actually being said?

It starts by saying the header of the Max patch, so it says “Max V2” because the file format is the second, and then there are asterisks that come after.

I wanted to ask about “Static” because its beat reminds me of a lot of the hip-hop that was coming out of Atlanta and Miami in the ’90s. Was that something you were interested in at the time? It sounds like a dubbier take on Atlanta and Miami bass.

Hip-hop never played a significant role in my music, but there was this way of treating bass drums and bass that caught my interest. Also, the sampling philosophy behind hip-hop, this notion of sampling as quotation, is something that comes up too in a very inaudible way. There are definitely some production things there that I’m interested in as well, but the hip-hop I’m interested in is usually the stuff that sounds very electronic.

Are we talking about electro?

It’s where hip-hop and electro and breakbeats meet. Everything that goes more into exploration of the rhythm and less into the vocal part.

Did you ever care about UK rappers who were rapping over 2-step beats?

That was interesting to me as a live phenomena. There was a party series in Berlin where we had drum ‘n’ bass parties with emcees, and I found that it was there that the emcees worked really well as, well, masters of ceremonies (laughter). The DJ would be in the background and the emcee would have a connection between the DJ and the dancing audience—that definitely worked, and it worked in multiple ways. It was an art style in itself, with rapping and beatboxing and all this being synchronized to the music, as setting markers in the music, including the call for the DJ to rewind. I liked that a lot. I almost forgot about that period. I think it’s a general thing, too, that the pop music that interests me most is when the music is as significant as the singing.

I think that makes sense with Depeche Mode, as you mentioned earlier.

That’s a great example because you can immediately imagine their music as instrumentals and it’d be just as powerful.

Over the past few years you’ve reissued various releases, including Gobi. The Desert EP (1999), which you extended. And then you had the Hongkong (1997) reissue. What is it like for you to revisit these pieces?

It triggers a lot of emotions. The good news is that I like these songs, mostly, and they’re not embarrassing to listen to. As with everything, change is nice but it means that things are not the same anymore, so I notice certain colors and techniques that I’ve lost over the years and think, oh it was nice doing things this way, I should revisit that. But there are other things where I’m like, well, I’m glad I’m beyond that. It’s been positive overall. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’m happy that I did things that I can still enjoy 20 years later.

What are the things you’re happy to have moved beyond, and what are things that you miss?

The endlessness is my answer to both. There’s an inherent contradiction there. I’m happy that I made these endless tracks, but at the same time I’m happy that I’m not doing them anymore. The question, then, is to figure out what to make of that (laughter). Maybe the contradiction that comes out of this is that I want to have more simplification and sophistication.

That’s what good engineering is!

Maybe, yeah (laughter). I want to polish things so that they look easy and unobtrusive but also present them in a way where I can admire their beauty.

I’m thinking of your recent album Studio (2024) and a song like “Global Transport,” which also starts with a voice, though they’re not whispers, they’re the voices you’d hear at a train station.

It’s actually a field recording. It’s from a trip to Italy in 2012, and what I liked was that these voices were also computer generated but were still in a natural habitat. You’re in the sun in Italy on a train station and you have this Italian vibe there, and it’s all very relaxed, and then you have this computer voice that’s simultaneously synthetic and Italian and broken. It tells a lot of stories.

The qualities of this voice you’re talking about also feel appropriate with how it’s used in the song and then aligned with music. There’s a jaggedness there.

That’s a result of a lot of microediting; I changed the timing. This is stuff that a good singer or rapper does intuitively, and I had to teach it to these voices (laughter). Again, this was something that took some time to get it into a shape where I liked it, but it was important for me to do it manually. It would’ve been very boring otherwise.

I like that the song comes after “Intermezzo” too, which is a song that makes more sense to me after you mentioned Jean-Michel Jarre. There’s a similar cheeriness there, and it even sounds like something that could’ve come out decades ago.

“Intermezzo” has an interesting technical background. It was created with an old synthesizer with a broken keyboard, and the broken keyboard triggers notes a lot whenever you press it. The synthesizer always tries to restart the voice and it makes this kind of (makes stuttering noises with mouth) sound. When this problem occurred, I was smart enough to record it; you have a glitch there, and instead of fixing it, you keep it. It was only afterwards that I fixed it.

We were just talking about electro, too, and you can hear that in “Red Alphonso.”

Making this album felt like a liberation because the world is a frightening, nasty place. This album was made during COVID and shortly thereafter. Nothing mattered anymore. Sales are down, everything’s in a bad state, and now I just do what I want to do. I used the overall crisis as a good reason to not be bothered by expectations; I just did what I felt like and that was it. My studio became a shelter.

I have to ask about the closing track, “Eclipse,” based on that comment as it sounds like an outlier in your entire discography. It sounds like a warped marching band at times. And then in the second half, the stuttering synth arrives again. Do you mind talking about that track?

That’s exactly it. I had this fictional person in mind, where they’re marching towards something. It’s very cinematic.

Is that something you’re doing a lot, where you’re imagining a person to create a song?

What happens is that I start a piece often out of a technical question—let’s see if I can get this sound together with another sound. If I have good luck, some images occur, and once these images are there, I use them to work further on the music. A good example is the first track, “The Elders Disagree.” I had these sounds and, at one point, I had this image of a small mountain village with these elders sitting on tree trunks in the sun. I imagined them having an argument about something completely irrelevant. Someone says, “Oh, your perspective is ridiculous,” and then someone else says, “No, I don’t think it’s ridiculous, and here’s why,” and then someone else chimes in to say that they’re both ridiculous. There is this meandering between the angry and annoyed but, like an old couple, everyone is still okay. The music created this dialogue between these elders, and that was my image for the piece. In this regard, maybe that’s why film school helped, as I have these ideas of narrative and structure over time. It’s important to me that an album has a certain feeling of completeness and that it’s not an arbitrary collection of stuff—it has to have a color and a shape.

I have a couple questions I wanted to ask before we end our time together. First, I want to know if you can share anything about where [former Monolake member] Torsten Pröfrock has been. It’s been a long time since he’s released music and I really love all of it.

He stopped making music and he’s totally stubborn—it’s impossible to get him to release anything (laughter). So many people have approached me to see if he’d be interested in releasing his old music again. I have three CD-Rs with unreleased music from him, but he just doesn’t want to release any of it. There is an interesting club called Open Ground that opened a couple years ago in Wuppertal, which is in the middle of Germany. It’s run by the former bookkeeper of Basic Channel, so it’s all family. Torsten used to work at Hard Wax, but he moved to Wuppertal because he was fed up with Berlin, and now he works as the bookkeeper at this club. So he’s still very much in the music business, but he’s not releasing anything anymore and there’s no way to convince him.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?

I am very frightened about the world. What is going on in your country has repercussions for all of us. Every single day, I open the newspaper, I read something that your current government is doing, and think, what the fuck. The amount of destructive energy… I’m speechless. I never thought that something like this could ever happen. I have a friend who is interested in music and she’s a graphic designer. She lives in one of those big seaside Russian towns that no one knows, and she’s also a smart software developer, and she wrote what is basically a ChatGPT client to create images. She showed me the results, and now comes the madness, which is that if she types “a field of flowers,” she gets a field of flowers. If she types “a field of flowers and a beer,” it comes back with a field of flowers and a beer. If she types “a field of flowers with a rainbow and a beer,” she gets a field of flowers with a beer, and the reason is that the service, which connects with ChatGPT, filters out the word rainbow. And that’s just how it is.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

There’s a few things, but the one thing that I feel is most important, given the circumstances and the times, is my empathy. That’s what is missing with so many other people. That seems to be more important these days than ever before. Being able to understand that certain things cause other people suffering, and being able to understand what makes people happy, and putting yourself in another person’s perspective to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing… and then you use this as an ethical guideline for your work and behavior.

I’m quite active on social media, and it happens that, as a public figure, I post my perception of the current political situation. There are people who follow me because they like my music, but they do not share my beliefs. For me, there’s always the question of, how do I deal with that? What I try to do is to start with the assumption that the person maybe has a reason to be like that, so let’s figure it out. I’ll try to be open as a starting point. Someone might say some pseudoscientific nonsense to say that the US is right to do what it’s doing; instead of blocking that person and calling them a moron, which is typical social media behavior, I try to take them seriously. Why do you think this is the case? And I mean, in 90% of all situations, I end up blocking them because it leads to nothing and becomes insulting, but then there’s the 10% where something meaningful comes out.

I’ve had experiences with people where I could use my position to create seeds of other types of thinking in their head. During Brexit times, I had a discussion with a person in the UK, and his whole social media account was full of right-wing propaganda. Instead of blocking him, I just said to him in a polite way, “You’re a guest on my page. Regardless of your opinions, don’t insult other people. You can write your opinion here, and I won’t delete it, but if you’re insulting others I will.” I ended up having a series of personal messages with him and he was a kid living in a small town in the UK where, according to the demographics listed online, everyone there is voting right wing. But I could tell that this wasn’t a stupid Nazi; it was just someone who grew up in an environment where there was no other opinion. I could tell that talking with me made him think a little bit. And I think that’s important in these times. So yes, empathy.

Monolake’s music can be found at Bandcamp. His 2001 album Gravity was remastered last year. More information about Robert Henke can be found at his website.

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Gerhard Behles & Robert Henke of Monolake. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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