Most people come back from a holiday with a wicker donkey, tan-lines, or a purse of manky coins to show for it. Not Monolake’s Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke. After their trip to China, the German duo amassed dozens of DATs of ambient noises, field-recorded around the streets, woods and tunnels of Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
These audio postcards weren’t just mementos of their travels. They’d provide the essential audio glue that would finally bind together the sonic sketches and analogue live jams they’d been making. Bringing these tracks together as an artist album that would go on to be hailed as a landmark in the evolution of early experimental dub techno.
“It was the most important album in musical history,” says Robert Henke, tongue firmly in-cheek. “I don’t know why anyone afterwards still tried to compose. That chapter was closed.”
The first chapter, however, goes back to when Monolake were asked by their minimal techno peers, Basic Channel, for beats for their fledgling record imprint.
“They wanted music for their new Chain Reaction label,” says Henke. “We played them Cyan and a few more, which all got released. And when it became album time, we augmented them with these field recordings we’d captured during the International Computer Music Conference we were attending in Hong Kong, hence the name.”
Henke and Behles had a hoot adding the field recordings to the body of ambient material they’d already laid down, with tones and textures of a Chinese transit system being a favourite flavour of Henke’s.
“There was this great recording from inside a subway there,” he says. “Then I merged it with some sounds I’d created which we’d finally augment with synthesiser solos from Wieland Samolak, to make this perfect melancholic part of the album.”
The whole LP would be a similar masterclass in mood and movement, with Studio One dub influences meeting early Detroit, pieced together with the cutting-edge sound science of two producers at the top of their game.
"There was no computers back in those days, and this meant we had to write down all the settings and draw automation curves on paper," Henke recalls. "It was not that much different from today, but it took more time. On the good side, this meant we were always happy with the first version of each track."
In the late ‘90s, Henke and Behles founded Ableton alongside Bernd Roggendorf. The pair’s experiences working with hardware sequencers and self-made Max tools while working in Monolake provided much of the impetus for the original version of Ableton’s DAW, Live.
“Working with our own sequencers inspired us a few years later to develop a commercial tool for improvisation,” Henke explains.
Henke would go on to man Monolake as a largely solo project around 1999, with Gerhard Behles leaving to run Ableton. After working together on early versions of Live, Henke moved back to solo music and art installation projects, which he continues to this day, alongside various contributions to Ableton.
Torsten ‘T++’ Proefrock would add contributions to the albums Cinemascoope [2002] and Polygon Cities [2005]. And the last full-length Monolake release was Studio [2024] on Henke’s own Monolake/Imbalance Computer Music label.
Hongkong track by track with Robert Henke
Cyan
“Making tracks in the 1990s was always a mix of a musical exploration and a technical one. The core of Cyan is a strange loop from a field recording I made in a forest near Berlin, and in it there’s a mosquito flying by the mic. We transposed it down a bit and it became that odd bassline/theme.
“Other ingredients which are important are the [Roland] Juno-6 with its arpeggiator running out of sync with the rest, played by Gerhard [Behles], and the ring modulator algorithm from the mighty Alesis QuadraVerb, ‘played’ by me.
“Also very important for the typical Monolake sound: the absence of any normal computer drums. We simply had none, only a Roland TR-505 with its completely unusable kit of bad rock drums, and hence the drums on all early Monolake tracks are FM sounds from a Yamaha TG77, excessively using its eight individual outputs. The track is the result of a long recording session that we later cut into its final shape.”
Index
“This is actually a Robert Henke solo track, which I made one Friday evening to get into the mood for going out. I did not expect it to become more or less finished. But, it somehow did, and I made a quick recording of it on my portable DAT recorder, and took it with me to Panasonic – a small but influential bar/club/art space run by friends. It got integrated in the DJ set, whilst I was sitting at the bar. That was fun. I went home and refined it, based on that experience.
“When re-releasing Hongkong on CD in 2008, I thought that it was too different from the other tracks and removed it. But, when listening more recently to the first CD issue, I came to the conclusion that it belongs in there. Judging one’s work is always a challenge. One cannot be objective or distant enough.”
![Monolake - Index [Field Records] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/bDVEREGvDC8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Lantau/Macau
“These two tracks are a miracle of higher order. Friends of ours used to have a nice little Meyer Sound PA system, ‘rescued’ from a former East German concert hall. They used it for parties and they were supplying it for a record release party at a club called Friseur der Botschaft, in the summer of 1996. They asked Gerhard and me if we would be interested in doing something there, too. We said yes, and the first Monolake live gig in history happened.
“As usual I did the technical preparations, deciding which equipment to use (Juno-6, TR-505 as a sequencer, QuadraVerb, Lexicon PCM80, Waldorf Microwave, TG77, Ensoniq ASR-10 rack, and a MIDI fader box and a mixer) and made some test sequences with the TR-505, which we used not as a drum computer for the mentioned reasons, but as a very basic sequencer. The rest was improvisation; deleting and setting steps on the drum computer (mainly Gerhard), and playing with effects and mixing (mainly me).
“When we arrived at the venue, the guy from that record label turned out to be a complete dick and didn’t allow us to set up our gear on ‘his’ DJ table. So we instead installed ourselves behind the bar.
“When we started playing, some guy completely high on something started dancing with finger cymbals right in front of us. It took us a bit to get used to that. Tssinggg! Tssssinggg! Tsinnngggg!
“And then, in the middle of the gig, some other dude asked Gerhard for a beer – since he was behind the bar – completely ignoring the fact that he was totally occupied operating the Juno-6! Gerhard stopped doing what he did, went to the fridge, gave the guy the beer and continued, being completely in the zone.
“Everyone in the audience was totally into what we did. And we did record it all on my little DAT recorder. I have no idea how we did what we did there, but it became magic.
“And at some point the idiot from the record label told us to stop. I was never afraid of playing super loud, and we had lots of headroom on the PA. I nodded and continued playing, telling Gerhard that we are going to stop soon. Then I made everything much, much louder and everyone was screaming in joy. That was the last eight bars of Macau. Lantau was the 20 minutes or so before that end. And this is how Monolake Live began.”
Arte
“Arte is a collaborative French, German and Swiss cultural television channel. They became interested in what goes on in Berlin with electronic dance music, and wanted to talk with Gerhard and me ‘in the studio’. Which, of course, was my kitchen-bedroom-kinky-dungeon-livingroom-studio apartment back in the 1990s.
“I thought there needs to be something running when we show the studio, so we started to quickly hack together something, mainly driven by a nice pad from my newly acquired Sequential Circuits Prophet VS synthesiser. When the TV folks left after the interview, we decided to work more on it, since it had such a nice timbre. And then we named it Arte.
“It’s a typical track of that period, as far as the working process is concerned: we jammed with the studio and recorded it all. And then a few days later, we listened to what we did and when there was something nice, we tried to edit it into a piece. The strange changes in sound/atmosphere in our tracks are a byproduct of that working style. And in retrospective, pretty unique.
“Most credit for editing the tracks into shape goes to Gerhard. Most credit for sound-design goes to me. Also important is the fact that we wrote our own sequencer in Max, which allowed us to improvise with patterns in a very free manner, but with a focus on note velocities (and timbre, when controlling synthesisers) and less on melody. Our melodies often were the result of tuning percussions, and that’s it.
“And working with our own sequencers inspired us a few years later to develop a commercial tool for improvisation…”
Occam
“In the winter of 1996 some brave folks associated with the Chain Reaction label went onto their first tour outside Germany to Switzerland. And, as part of that little tour, Gerhard and me played at a small place in Luzern, on the snowy night of December 28th.
“The concert was unremarkable, but some fifteen minutes of it worked out fine. As usual, we recorded it, and when back in Berlin we decided those good parts needed to be turned into a track. Now, not much really happens musically in there. It was a straight groove, and I played with effects and applied lots of filtering on the mixing desk. Gerhard considered the track boring, but I liked it.
“We spent quite some time trying to make it more interesting via editing, and it lost all its beauty on the way. So, we started over again, just making two edits where things went wrong for a few bars. We applied some sort of Occam’s razor principle to it. Hence the title.
“The most essential pieces of equipment during that tour and on that track were my Ensoniq ASR10 rack sampler, my QuadraVerb, and a slightly obscure Speck Electronics filter bank, which I inherited from the Basic Channel guys, and which I used excessively to create those complex filter sweeps.
“Editing a track in Protools back in the days of Hongkong meant doing it with an absurdly expensive audio interface providing only two inputs and outputs [Digidesign Audiomedia II] and equally expensive SCSI hard disks, and the need to calculate fades offline. Hard to believe we got anything done with it.”
Mass Transit Railway
“When compiling the music for Hongkong, I felt that something was missing – it needed one more atmospheric piece. I went through my DAT tapes and found a recording of a live set I played a year or two earlier in a backyard of a squatted house in East Berlin on a Sunday afternoon. I edited it down but somehow something was missing.
“Gerhard came up with the idea to ask our common friend, Wieland Samolak, to play a solo on top. Wieland had this interesting technique of using a Yamaha Breath Controller and the handle of a Yamaha Keytar with no keyboard, and only the pitch bend and mod-wheel to control his Oberheim Xpander. Then we added some nice Quantec QRS reverb and nothing can go wrong!
“We sent Wieland the track, on tape via mail, because this is pre-internet! And he sent us his solo voice back a few days later. We took the liberty to only use a tiny part of his improvisation, and I think he’s still annoyed by that, but we were super happy with it.
“Then there are these field recordings I made in Hong Kong during the 1996 Computer Music Conference. Figuring out which of them worked in conjunction with which track gave the album its unique shape and tone. Once we merged the recording from the subway with the lush chords at the beginning of my Sunday afternoon set, it became clear that this must be the end of the album. And the title is the name of the subway system.”
For all Robert Henke’s latest music and art news, as well as his live dates, head to roberthenke.com
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