The Herb Sundays Weekend Magazine: Robert Henke / Monolake
An interview with artist/musician and co-creator of Ableton Live plus a Monolake playlist by Akeem Asani of Purelink & The enduring appeal of dubby techno.
An interview with musician, audiovisual artist, and co-creator of Ableton Robert Henke, AKA Monolake.
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Playlist: Herb Sundays in focus: Monolake (chosen by Akeem Asani of Purelink) - Apple / Spotify. art by .
This week is unusual as it's an interview excerpt (I’ve only done a couple before, Suzanne Ciani and Kevin Kelly). I had a call with Robert, recorded in my car back in May, but I didn’t know quite what to do with it without a mix, so I asked Akeem Asani of electronic 3-piece Purelink (as well as being one my consistent go-tos at Secretly Distribution) for his view on the Monolake oeuvre, and it is perfect, of course. Please enjoy 90 minutes of introspective satisfaction (Apple / Spotify/Most songs are on Bandcamp as well).
Akeem’s group, Purelink, is one of my fave acts and just released a new album, Faith, featuring the great Loraine James (Herb 145). I’ve been a fan of Akeem’s music, solo and in Purelink, for a minute now (
has receipts) so it’s great to see them continuing to find a bigger stage, including a great feature in Crack Magazine and a Pitchfork interview with (“Rather than leaning into the percussive side of their music, they’ve buried the rhythms even deeper into a churning wash of grainy textures and shape-shifting clouds of electroacoustic tone.”). Everything they make is recommended around these Herb watercoolers & lunch tables.Akeem had this to say about Robert:
“Saying Monolake is an influence is a bit of an understatement.
Intersecting techno, downtempo, ambient, minimal and more, myself and countless others have them to thank: not only for their contributions sonically (including Chain Reaction), but also for their development of Ableton, one of the most used and celebrated music softwares today.
I would not be where I am today without their work.”
- AS for Herb Sundays
Monolake began as an electronic music act based in Berlin, founded in 1995 by Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles, but has been Henke’s sole project for the last couple of decades. Like a lot of the great German electronic music, from Krautrock to GAS, there’s that taut sterility (horseshoe-ing into funk) but also a deep, almost spiritual connection to nature. In the canon of Dub Techno, Monolake looms large, though he doesn’t claim to be a torch bearer at this point (“After making electronic music since almost thirty years I don't care anymore about genres, about how to label things. It is music, my own personal music, and that's it. Call it 'electronica' if you wish.”), he understands why the sound still resonates.
Last September, he released his new album Studio and this year marked a reissue/remaster and first vinyl pressing of his album 2001 album Gravity, which marked the last time Monolake was a collaboration with Gerhard Behles, who also co-founded Ableton. Field Records says: “Occupying its own space at the intersection of dub techno, minimal and electronica, it's an ageless album of staggering vision and technological prowess, which has matured into an all-time pillar of electronic music.”
So why have Henke and his ‘90s dub techno peers and their sounds found a resurgence in this decade? Maybe post-lockdown audiences learned to get a handle on ambient textures being sufficient as complete music, maybe dance music is having another “moment” in general, or maybe it’s just that there’s more good stuff coming out. It’s hard to say. The great Ted Davis spent time with this question and wrote for this DJ Magazine last year:
While the connective tissue between the scattered figures in this scene-not-scene can be slippery and tough to classify, a shared ingredient in its make-up tends to be a taste for the foggy, chillout room-ready styles that flourished in the late ’80s and early ’90s — trip-hop, glitch, downtempo, ambient and dub techno. The influence of the latter genre in particular — an atmospheric fusion of Detroit techno’s rhythmic minimalism with Jamaican dub’s echoing resonances, made famous by Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus’ Basic Channel project and subsequent Chain Reaction label — has helped rebuild this music’s connection to the club. Even at its most atmospheric and formless, its delay-drenched trademarks and throbbing basslines are made to be heard through the speakers of smoke-filled venues.
One might be inclined then to assume that this new ambient dub generation originated in reaction to sustained emotional fallout from Covid lockdowns — a “balm for trying times” built in the online realm. But that conclusion feels somewhat flippant. For one, its roots go back much further than all that — woven together loosely from distinct lineages of electronic sounds and studio techniques. Plus, the best music in this extended ambient universe is hardly placid, and this new wave of artists isn’t trying to be either…
I’ve always admired Henke’s humility and open-mindedness, so I wanted to speak to him about a few obvious topics in electronic music. Here are some excerpts from our chat.
On Electronic music
SV: How do you feel about the celebrity or commercial status of electronic music? Is it an achievement, or have we gone too far away from a sort of “underground” which I know is important to your philosophy?
RH: It's not so easy to answer that question. Because you you can look at it, or I actually look at it from a few different angles. At the same time, I think everything that started as an underground movement and became interesting to a significant number of people just by nature becomes something else. You cannot be influential without becoming part of a bigger culture. It's just how it is, and bemoaning the fact that it's not this kind of small group of crazy folks is pointless because evolution is inevitable, and there is nothing to do against it, but it also has both good and bad sides. And you know the the fact that electronic music or the type of electronic music we are interested in, is now accessible for so many people, both in terms of listening to it, but also in terms of production. That is certainly something that is just great. And we can be happy that we are the generation who, to some degree, started all that. So instead of saying, Oh, it became all boring mainstream, we can just say, Hey, “we did this, and look.”
So yeah, that part, I think, is amazing, and I'm happy about it. The other part, of course, is everything that is commercial also comes with all the downsides of commercial experiences. There is a lot of money to make from it, and it is an interesting vehicle for all sorts of things that we might not have appreciated that much, you know, like being used as background for advertisement of products which we might not buy ourselves or this whole kind of celebrity Techno DJ scene, where something seems to be important. But it has less to do with the actual music than with something that is different. These are all aspects that yeah, they they come with something growing bigger. And I try for myself to focus on the things that I find are positive, and I still see a lot of those. including the fact that I also experience a lot of new music that blows me away.
I just came back from Barcelona, where I had a gig at a really really nice smaller festival. And the last DJ of that night she played some contemporary current drum and bass uptempo, break, beat things, and I have absolutely no idea about the artist she played. I have. I didn't recognize anything. But I thought, “Wow, this is really fresh.”
On gear, software, and cringe
SV: On a similar front, as someone who started with analog gear and mastered it and you’ve obviously been instrumental in the evolution of music software. I was watching an interview with David Cronenberg yesterday and talking about film. I think someone that this interviewer asked about, you know, “Do you miss film” as a texture, or whatever, and his answer was refreshing. It was like, basically, “No, I don't miss it at all. If you want grit and grain, you can get that” but he said he doesn't miss the process. Is that something that you think about with your own setup? Do you incorporate elements of older technology to get a certain feel or tactility?
RH: It's actually both, I feel, especially in this question, really a bit torn apart. There's the the logic in me that says, everything I'm interested in. I can do it on a laptop these days, and most of the artists whose output I admire most are doing exactly that. And most of the amazing sounds I hear these days are done with software and nothing else. But of course, as someone who grew up with this evolution of electronic instruments, and who, as a teenager, was lusting for these things, playing a Fairlight, or any of these machines that were magical and completely out of reach. I still have a bit of that feeling when I'm touching beautiful old machines. And it does something to me. So, in terms of music production, ultimately, what I'm doing is I have a few selected old instruments that are from that time and that I value very much. I play with them. I record some sounds, and then I use those sounds on my laptop.
I would not say that I need these old machines at all. But sometimes I enjoy it, and the joy gives me ideas, but often enough I end up doing things with them that are just at some point are discarded, and more serve as a starting point for a new idea that I then do in software. So I make a drum beat with my LinnDrum because I enjoy it right, and then I record it, and ultimately, I edit it in such a way that at the end, I could have done it with simple samples, so I love it. I think it's great. It's like using different paints and then it bleeds into your process.
But there's so much dogmatism involved everywhere. “Oh, you are only a good DJ, if you play only vinyl or you need an analog console,” or “you need this, or you need that, and your kick has to sound like this.” And you know. I think this. If I'm missing one thing, then it's maybe the innocence that we have that we had in the nineties because there was no blueprint. So every time someone made a new sound it was like, “Wow, a new sound.” And the the playfulness of a lot of the stuff that came out in the early nineties where people were just exploring like, “okay, let's let's throw a jazz loop in it. Let's speed it up.” Let's have the most ridiculous vocal samples going on in here. All these things that, in retrospect, either are super cringe or turned out to become iconic. These are all things that have been done with a certain innocence in the process, and I miss that innocence from myself, too, because there are so many things that I play once, and immediately I think to myself, no, you, you can't do that. No like. You can't use that riff, you can't use that sound, and so on. So in, in this regard, I think the evolution of a genre has also come with some restrictions that shouldn't be there but are innovatively coming up.
On Ableton and AI
SV: On that front, thinking as you're, you know, I think of you in some ways as a scientist, as a technologist, and as an entrepreneur. And I'm looking at how companies are evolving. Obviously, big companies are rushing to cram AI into their products to be seen as innovative or build their models simultaneously. I heard a rumor that some of the big visual arts software companies actually have more AI capability in their products than they show — that they’re actually holding back because they don’t want to make things too easy. As humans like challenges, and if you just press a button and it’s done that could hurt the software and the communities they build. I don’t know if that’s true. My question for you is: with Ableton, would things be any different if you started today? Would you have built them differently, or led the company differently?
RH: That's a complicated one. It's hard to say, of course, because the genesis of the software came from a different time with different mentalities and necessities. There are a lot of things we’d probably do differently now, but at the core — no, I don’t think we’d change that much. AI in music production is here to stay. We’re researching options, discussing them, watching what competitors are doing, and we have plans and ideas for the future. But ultimately, our goal is to make a product that enables people to do things — including complex things. So it will never be the one-button solution that creates a track.
That said, there are tons of great use cases for AI. Right now, LLMs are understood as massive research databases — giving you access to a huge amount of previously created data. That’s powerful. In music, if you write a melody and are stuck finding a bridge, you can tell AI, “Hey, here’s my melody, I need a bridge to the chorus.” And what it’s really doing is showing you who in the past wrote similar things and what was a typical bridge that worked. You’re getting a known, solid solution — which is satisfying because it’s familiar. But it also means you won’t get something totally radical or rule-breaking — for that, you still need to be radical yourself. And I think that’s great. There’s room for both. I’m not afraid of the artistic implications. I’m afraid of energy consumption and its environmental impact, monopolies, and the politics of this tech — but artistically, I’m not worried.
SV: Sure, that makes a lot of sense. And to your point — I think the history of electronic music and hip-hop, including sampling and scratching — these were all basically “mistakes” at first. Has anyone ever misused your software in the right way?
RH: All the time. That’s the beauty of it. Even with the first versions, people did things we didn’t anticipate. I love that — it’s like raising kids who eventually do things you never expected.
Bonus Beats
Daniel Bromfield for Spin Mag: 10 Essential Dub Techno Albums
FACT Mag’s best dub techno list (YouTube)
New Ghostly on Substack:
WIP some personal faves dub techno adjacent playlist (2023-2025), will post properly when finished one day.
Fun read!! Learning that Monolake make Ableton is just so cool. Never knew that connection existed!
And this also touches on a subject I was discussing recently with a loved one - what’s the point of the old analogue machines these days? I argued that it’s nice to be able to create a sound the way it had to be done back in the day, then we can still process it.
Well, now I'm happy to know that Monolake have created Ableton :-)