A constant panting, a never-ending whirr: in 1999, Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles collaborated for the last time on a joint album as Monolake. Even 27 years later, Interstate still sounds futuristic, like a machine that has given up precision in favour of atmosphere.
The opener »Abundance« takes its bearings from dub-techno registers, which it infuses with the erratic mechanics of a broken clockwork. Here, time runs off course; massive chords produce rear-end collisions all the way to a pile-up. Monolake is profoundly artificial music that nevertheless has feelings. »Gecko« plays out against an organic backdrop and, especially through its unsteady rhythm, feels more frayed than the controlled, sometimes cool brittleness of the opener. In »Tangent I«, delicate rivulets run down cave walls, while computer music discovers, prophetically, that in all its facets it has the makings of a biotope. That it is a living organism and far more than software, than stems in Ableton – the company Henke and Behles co-founded in the same year in which they produced Interstate. In »Tangent II«, too, there is a trickling, only the track feels more stringent. As though Pole’s dub had been fitted with a moderate four-to-the-floor beat. Interstate feels throughout as though the duo had consciously set themselves limits. As though both had known, even before the turn of the millennium, what sonic excess would come crashing down on electronic music in the decades to follow. Who else should have sensed it?
Interstate
