Monolake

Robert Henke, the Munich-born, Berlin-based artist who records and performs under the name Monolake, has spent three decades building one of electronic music's most singular bodies of work — minimal, dub-inflected techno that trades in texture, spatial depth, and restrained precision rather than bombast. The project began in 1995 as a collaboration with Gerhard Behles on Berlin's Chain Reaction label and became a solo vehicle in 1999, the same year Henke co-founded the music production software Ableton Live, which quietly reshaped how an entire generation makes and performs electronic music. His creative practice extends well beyond recorded output: custom instruments, self-written algorithms, and large-scale laser installations shown at the Tate Modern, the Barbican, and the Centre Pompidou place him as much in the lineage of audio-visual art as club music. His 2024 album Studio, assembled from a decade of archived material, confirmed that the Monolake sound continues to refine rather than repeat itself.