Monolake - Interstate
Label: Field Records – FIELD 39
Format: 2x12", Album, Remastered
Country: Germany
Released: June 11, 2026
Genre: Electronic
Style: Minimal Techno, Ambient
Interstate has always been a record out of time — too complex for the dancefloor, too rhythmically driven for pure ambient, too precise to be accidental. Released in 1999 as the final full collaboration between Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles, it captured Monolake at a singular moment of creative alignment that could never be repeated. Field Records' first-ever vinyl pressing, arriving remastered across a 2x12", finally gives this electronica landmark the physical form it has long deserved.
What Henke and Behles achieved on Interstate was something genuinely new. Their deepening exploration of Max/MSP yielded a kaleidoscopic lattice of micro-rhythms and textural work of extraordinary dynamism — eight distinct ecosystems of sound, each one its own world, elegant grooves threaded through their root structures with a touch so light it barely registers as compositional intent.
Tangent-I and Tangent-II carry a house-like low-end undulation beneath layers that swoon from techno synth shimmers to trickling water and pin-prick percussion; Ginza takes the rhythmic thrust of drum and bass and uses it as an engine for designer percussion and dub-soaked synth detail.
The results are both groovily instinctive and endlessly fascinating to pick apart. After Interstate, Behles departed to focus on Ableton Live and Monolake moved in a leaner direction — making this record not just a landmark but an unrepeatable document of a specific moment in digital music history, one that still sounds wildly futuristic 27 years on.
