Bleep

With his tenth Monolake album becoming a career highlight, Robert Henke follows up Studio to take us on an exclusive grand tour of his impressive discography. It’s been almost thirty years of Monolake, a mainstay in techno and the broader electronic field, and Henke has covered a lot of ground, with collaborators in the project’s initial half including fellow Ableton co-founder Gerhard Behles, and Torsten Pröfrock AKA T++ (AKA labelhead of DIN, AKA various aliases on Chain Reaction, and many more).

Selected Monolake Tracks runs the full spectrum of the artist's prolific output. There’s a lot of technical wizardry and cerebral details to appreciate about these career spanning selections, but what powers this mix is the absolute club thump of it all. The opening ‘Stratosphere’ from 2003’s Momentum wastes no time getting started, charging full speed ahead with its train track rhythms into tunnelling underground ambience, joined by fluctuating sparks and bass resonating like knocking steel pipes. Travel two decades into the future and you have the equally evocative ‘Prime Lundy’ from 2024’s Studio, clacking and coiling in all directions with abstract factory type percussion.

Across the tracklist’s timespan there’s mechanic beats and brooding industrial ambience, murky Berlin takes on UK garage and film score inspired, dub infused synthwave. That kind of materiality and experimentation is what makes a mix like this so exciting. Monolake often magnifies the micro sounds for dense layers that sweep the full frequency range, manifesting as a horde of locust like clicks forming a downpour on ‘Atomium’ as celestial bells toll beneath the four to the floor, or ‘Tangent I’, completely liquid in all aspects: molten bass, trickling ambience, acid ping ponging synths, and swishing beats.

It’s a marvel how tracks from across three decades weave so seamlessly into each other; not only has Monolake clearly evolved across these years, but kept consistently boundary pushing. A very highly recommended selection from one of our favourite artists here at Bleep.