[Photos by Jimmy Mould]
Words by Andrew Parks

“I don’t want to do something that’s been done 500 times already,” says Robert Henke (better known as Monolake), “but I guess that’s the fear of every artist. You want to create something of value, and in art production, that value comes from a certain uniqueness. Like there’s a lot of great minimal techno out there; someone else already did it, and they did it a hundred times better than I ever could. So I try to figure out something that’s more my own thing.”

That’s certainly been the case over the course of the last 15 years, as Henke’s gone from the field recording-fused Berlin techno of Hongkong to the hairpin turns and immersive but chilly club music of Monolake’s last two LPs, Silence and the recently released Ghosts. And then there’s the installations and gallery-invading A/V work Henke’s done under his own name, including a six-channel, deconstructive drone performance of his Layering Buddha album; a “temporal sonic sculpture” inspired by thunderstorms; and his Atom piece “for a matrix of 64 gas balloons, lights and sound.”

As for what he’s up to when we reach him via Skype, Henke’s busy putting the final touches on his Fundamental Forces piece in Vienna. Meant to mimic the what-does-it-all-mean nature of the universe itself, it’s his latest research/performance project with Tarik Barri, an audiovisual composer who’s become Henke’s recurring collaborator in recent years. The pair will present their stunning Ghosts In Surround concert at The Bunker’s Unsound party in Brooklyn on Friday night. Details on that killer bill—Demdike Stare, Laurel Halo, Ital, oh my!—are available here.

And now, onto our lengthy interview, which addresses everything from Henke’s new-found career as a teacher (in the Sound Studies department of the Berlin University of Arts) to the sci-fi book he may or may not publish soon after releasing his next record…