Happy Accidents: CS + Kreme and Monolake in conversation

Their most recent album ‘The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise’ was released on Will Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes and is perhaps their most accomplished to date, deeper than usual, more pensive.

This is where we introduce Monolake – the musical moniker of Robert Henke. Arguably one of the foremost innovators within electronic music, there are several parallels. First of all, the notion of intention and genre can be forgotten. When Monolake was first founded the concept of Dub Techno and to a degree the more electronic fringes of Ambient was still relatively new. It was far deeper than the fourth world material of previous and far more in tune with the ethereal, industrial world which was evolving around it. Robert has also just released a new record – ‘Studio’.

There are similarities in the present. A desire to unlearn and relearn, to experiment and remodel.

The two parties discuss.

Conrad Standish (CS + Kreme)

Sam Karmel (CS + Kreme)

Robert Henke (Monolake)

CONRAD: Hello Robert – nice to meet you and firstly, congrats on the new record, it’s another extremely deep, textured and 3D listen. I’m curious to know a little about your specific processes when you were making ‘Studio’. It is, after all, very few people who are making records on the DAWs that they themselves created. Are you often able to surprise yourself within the template of your own design?

ROBERT: Hi Conrad, surprise is such an integral part of artistic discovery for me, it happens all the time. Combine a few things and suddenly unexpected results can happen. I think this is partially what makes me like electronic music so much, the ease at which we can go from known territory to something that is unexpected. As far as the DAW is concerned, my biggest issue with it is that I am in a position where I can easily switch from user to developer mindset and that is sometimes really irritating when making music. You know, when I work with a synth or effect from someone else, I just accept how it works, but with Live I am always tempted to follow my developer duties and make notes when I come across something that bothers me. Letting go and focusing on music instead is sometimes quite hard. I think this is one reason why I still like to be surrounded by hardware, there I am free of that impulse.

ROBERT: What role does ‘following happy accidents’ play in your music?

CONRAD: Happy accidents are really always at the crux of what we are trying to get to. That’s always way more exciting to me than ‘well, here’s a beat I made and if we play these chords then I do this and you do that…’ Most of our greatest creative successes have probably been completely unintentional. Then it turns into ‘well, how do we best harness these accidents once they’ve occurred, or what can we do to increase the likelihood of these accidents?’ and I think Sam and I have become good at that – leaving each other lots of room to be as free as possible.

SAM: If you were to look forward to 100 years’ time, how do you think people will be making electronic music and what will it sound like?

ROBERT: I have absolutely no idea. We will probably be surprised by what people do in ten years. For good and for bad AI is going to change how people interact with computers and what they come up with. On one side I expect the most bizarre and weird stuff to happen, at least that’s my hope,  but on the other side I am sure people will still want to sound like 1980s disco house.  Are you interested in AI for music generation? Did you try it out?

CONRAD: To an extent, yeah. I mean, we already use generative sequencing and algorithmic tricks in a lot of our composition – which isn’t AI – but it is also handing the reins over to ‘chance’. I’m not opposed to AI in certain uses, but it has to be more creative than just ‘write me a moody string motif in E flat minor’ and then just sticking that on top of something that we’ve made. So if it comes to be that there’s a really fresh way that we can use it, then I’m down. Why not? We’ll see what that looks like eventually I guess. We can certainly get by without it, but we don’t really have any restrictions on what is and isn’t permissible within CS + Kreme.

SAM: Initially I was so keen on exploring the possibilities of what AI could bring to the creative table and was investigating training RAVE with Conrad’s voice and then feeding it corruptions, hoping that it would come out with bizarre mutations in the style of Conrad.  It just started getting so labour intensive and I had to source super powerful computers etc . I basically gave up.  The thing is I’ve yet to hear anything in the audio realm that has blown me away with AI – lots of it sounds similar to effects I’ve come across using fourier transform effects and creative edits etc. I’m open for sure, I crave hearing and creating things that I have never heard before.

ROBERT: This brings me to a related question: I can’t play any ‘real’ instrument,  I am happy if I find the right chords on the piano after searching for long enough, but that also enables me to try different paths to achieve music.

How do you feel about this? What is your musical background?  Do you sometimes feel the need to ‘unlearn’ to achieve what you are looking for artistically? What strategies do you employ to find something new within your work?

SAM: I’ve definitely gone through the unlearn thing a lot, I had significant training in the Classical world when I was young but gave it up just after high school. I was so bored with the paradigms, that’s when i got into electronic music that seemed so free and moved me so much at the time but that eventually wore thin as well and I spent time in a weird improv group called “Bum Creek” trying to break down what music was and explore wild paths for a fair few years. I (we) always keep that mentality to an extent but in a cyclic type of way I seem to enjoy re learning my roots more and more, classical music sounds sweet to me these days.

SAM: What’s the most artistically moving experience you have ever had?

ROBERT: Wow, that is a complex question. So many important moments come to my mind immediately. The beauty of art is so often that it is combined or related to other experiences around it. So much essential music we discover at an age where our life is often completely upside down, and where the experience of music and of other life changing situations is so deeply entangled. Or any form of art. Going alone to an art museum because I decided I want to do this, and then wandering around and looking at sculptures and paintings without anyone telling me what to think and do once as a kid in Munich was as moving as was buying my first record with electronic music (Tangerine Dream: Logos) without the ability to listen to it first, then carrying it home and spending the next weeks trying to grab every single note, sound, harmony, timbre, soundscape. Any many similar experiences with records in the years to come: Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians, Brian Eno and Jon Hassell: Forth World Music). Or movies!!! Of course! Or books. And then, several years later, my first Monolake Live gig in Berlin, I still have very vivid memories of a lot of details, how I felt doing this in front of a dancing audience). I guess I have no single most moving experience, but a large collection of ‘essential ones’. The more I think about it, the more comes up again. And a lot is indeed connected to people – art as social experience. I believe this is also why concerts and club culture are so dear to me. Experiencing something amazing together, without words, with strangers that can agree with each other for a moment. How important is playing shows for you?

CONRAD: At the start of this project I really didn’t want it to be a performance orientated thing, but then after ‘relenting’ to a friends’ request we played an outdoor show in a bat colony by a river in Melbourne, which was really fun. So then we had a rule that we would only play outdoors, which was quite cool for a while, and then a couple of years later we did a few shows in the UK and one of those was at The White Hotel in Manchester. Hearing ourselves on a proper, proper sound system really altered things for us, and it affected the way we started to write stuff and we then threw out the ‘outdoor only’ policy. Now we’ve been lucky enough to play all over the world at all these amazing spots and to really connect with people in quite a deep way, so playing shows has, for me, become important again. I love touring/travelling, that’s when I’m at my happiest really. I think I was just burnt by the end of my previous band, so with CS + Kreme at the start I was like ‘No shows! No being a normal band!’

SAM: I love playing shows and the feelings and places that the shows take us, sometimes I have to pinch myself, I’m just not a fan of the actual travel part in general ha!

CONRAD: Monolake has long been some of my favourite driving, or transit music – I associate a lot of your records with night drives through some sort of metropolis. ‘Studio’ also works very well in this regard, and was excellent whilst on tour recently. What are some of your favourite records to soundtrack a moody midnight drive or subway trip?

ROBERT: Yeah, I can relate to that. In fact when mastering and mixing my music I often let it run in the background for a while. I like the idea of ‘interesting background music’. I personally find that a lot of British synth pop from the 1980s works very well here too: John Foxx, Gary Newman, but also Coil, Clock DVA, a lot of music makes a lot of sense when riding the subway.I also once walked through Belgrade in a rainy and windy night with ‘Consumed’ by Plastikman / Richie Hawtin on headphones and that became the soundtrack for this city for ever. I am from the generation for which suddenly with the arrival of the Sony Walkman it became possible to listen to music outside home, in the subway or on your bike. Hard to imagine that before that it was only possible with a bigger cassette player with huge batteries.

I hope your tour worked out fine!? What else is good music for you to listen to when you tour? Also, are you deliberately avoid listen to music at specific times to not get too much input or be distracted? Sometimes when producing I need to really avoid other music, and I wonder if this is the same for you?

CONRAD: Yeah tour was great, thanks. Sam and I differ in this regard, but I’m usually pretty happy to listen to music at any point in my processes. I don’t get too swayed by it if I’m writjng, or distracted in a negative way. I definitely go through periods where most music irritates me, or just doesn’t do it for me, but most of the time I’m still pretty bewitched by it.

SAM: As Con points out I tend to try to keep the horse blinders on or in a sense im not that interested in other music when a creative period is happening.

Buy the CS + Kreme album HERE & Monolake HERE.