Robert Henke - Monolake - How sound is born

Robert Henke – as well as his offshoot Monolake – is one of the key figures through whom to read the last 30 years of electronic music. Berlin, the techno epic, Chain Reaction, ambient-drone, the ability to reinvent himself, Ableton, audiovisual work elevated to an immersive dimension. All of this, contained within a story that speaks first of the past, then of a future that circles back to the past. Just like in his new show “Cbm 8032 Av”.

I'd like to start by talking about geography. In October you brought “Cbm 8032 Av” to the Biennale Musica di Venezia, a city that in many ways is “far removed from the world”. You live in Berlin, and your history is closely tied to this city. From your point of view, what has been Berlin's musical and cultural trajectory over the last 30 years?

It's almost impossible to answer, Berlin is one of the most vibrant cultural cities in the world, with a very varied and diverse artistic and musical scene. What is certainly true and significant is electronic music's shift from a niche to a major cultural and economic factor, with all its positive and problematic properties.

Coming to your musical trajectory: in works like Henke and Monolake, different sonic traits stand out. What's it like working as Monolake and as Henke? What distinguishes the two approaches, and what do they have in common?

Monolake was born as a duo together with Ableton's CEO and dear friend Gerhard Behles, hence the need to find a name. Today Monolake focuses more on the fringes of club culture, while I also explore other musical and artistic subjects that deserve a distinction. Hence Robert Henke, which simply labels authorship, and Monolake as a specific brand.

Just like with Henke, the last work dates back to 2009. Should the release of albums under the Henke name be considered closed? Is your sonic focus currently directed solely towards Monolake?

The lack of releases under my own name is simply due to the fact that time is limited, and there were always things getting in the way when I tried to finish an album. There are many sketches in the drawer that will one day deserve to be released. Releasing a new Monolake album from time to time is partly an economic necessity and carries a certain priority; it forces me to sit down in the studio and finish the work. But equally important is the fact that most of my projects under the name Robert Henke are audiovisual by nature, and I always feel that releasing the sound alone doesn't do the projects justice. “CBM 8032 AV” is highly theatrical, with a unity of time, place and narrative that can't be replicated on CD, just as a play can only be fully experienced in a theatre.

Monolake, to me, has always been one of the projects — straddling ambient, techno, dub and experimentation — most inspired by that wave which found its safe harbour in the Basic Channel label. What do you remember of that period?

The most significant memories concern how small and personal the scene was back then, and how little it was driven by market forces, simply because there was no significant market. And there was no social media. Our biggest reference point and echo chamber were the people around us who shared similar ideas. In hindsight, this was an ideal starting position, with a lot of mental freedom to develop a personal signature. I wouldn't want to start now, faced with the pressure of having to promote myself 24/7 on social media, constantly comparing my work to that of millions of people around the world. Art is not a competition, it's not about establishing who's the best, for which there's no real criterion anyway. It's about finding your own unique voice. And that was strongly supported by the scene in the early Nineties.

Throughout your career, there seems to be a thread that ties everything together: your love of machines, especially computers, including the software we all have to thank you for: Ableton. Where does that come from?

It's one of the tragic misconceptions of our culture to separate engineering and the arts so drastically. No scientific progress can happen without wild, radical imagination; good engineering requires dedicated attention to detail and elegance, with plenty of freedom to do things in many possible ways. No art can be made without logic, without knowledge of one's tools and a deep understanding of their functionality. Telling people they can't be artists because they're too rational, or believing that artists are emotional but irrational people, is damaging both to the arts and to engineering. The result is ticket machines that nobody can operate, and art that lacks brilliance in its execution. I get enormous amounts of artistic inspiration when I build my instruments and equipment, and my engineering work, especially at Ableton, benefits enormously from my deep understanding of the artistic process. The instruments I'm surrounded by in the studio were built by human beings who put a lot of love and dedication into them, and that radiates outward. When you play with these instruments, the signature of their creators comes through, and that establishes a much deeper bond than one defined by function alone. It's a dialogue with a machine, built by a person, and therefore it's an interaction with a personality.

On this point, let me ask you: is there still room to innovate within electronic music? Or has everything that could be played already been done, and now it's just a matter of hybridization?

That possibility is about the same as writing a new, thought-provoking text using twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

The visual dimension of your shows has always been prominent — I'm thinking, for instance, of "Lumiere". How do you design the visual side of one of your audiovisual performances?

The key is that I invent a machine/system that lets me compose for both aspects at the same time. In Lumiere, every "note" is both a visual shape and a musical event. Every articulation affects both the sound and the visual appearance. It's neither a film score following a pre-produced film nor a visualization of music, but a radically new and personal hybrid form. For the "Cbm 8032 Av" performance I followed a similar concept, both technically and artistically.

"Cbm 8032 Av" is a wonderful show and I can't wait to see it again. Can you tell us how it came about? On stage you seem more like a conductor than an actual musician.

Indeed, I am more of a conductor, but that's true of almost all electronic music since its inception, and it has been widely discussed in the literature. The beauty of electronic systems is that they can replace actual musicians, and the performer's role becomes closer to that of a conductor. I control various aspects of the composition — timbres, articulations, structure — and shape the flow of time across many scales, but I'm not the one playing every single note or painting every single character on screen, which would obviously be impossible.

"Cbm 8032 Av" began with a curious exploration of what kind of things I could do with a personal computer from 1980 — a very iconic but very limited machine, which at its heart uses a microprocessor from 1975. Much to my surprise, I discovered that if I'm skilled at paring things down, and if I learn to program that microprocessor's native machine language, I can achieve far greater complexity than I expected. Then I came up with the idea of forming an orchestra of five computers, and after three years of hard work, the first iteration of "Cbm 8032 Av" was unveiled to the world in 2019. Since then the project has undergone several major upgrades, and I'm very happy to be presenting a fairly mature and expanded version in Venice.

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