Monolake in full

Derek Walmsley: Tell me about your sabbatical.

Monolake: Well, as someone who is involved in the creation of Live since day zero, I felt at some point that I need a bit of distance, a distance to the actual development of the product. I wanted to reach a stage where I didn't feel responsible anymore, because sometimes it's tough to be in this position where you always feel you can change things. Since I'm also working with Live, it became stressful to me, it became stressful to work on music and at the same time also think, this detail of the software needs to be improved, and then stop making music, start writing down notes about the software. I really felt a strong need to stop that for a while, and just use it without thinking about the software itself.

D: So basically a psychological and creative need.

M: Yeah. And the same goes for the engagement with the company and everything that goes on there. Ableton grew very quickly the last 2-3 years. And suddenly all these people are in the office and I don't know them, or only very briefly, and so many things which happened on a very informal level suddenly (are) formalized, or had to become formalized. So I really felt that Ableton takes a lot of my energy away. And as much as I like to be part of that, I feel that I'm getting unhappy, and I'm getting stressed, and this reflects back to the tone of my emails... [laughs] I realized in discussions with my colleagues at Ableton, man, I am so stressed. It's not a pleasure anymore to talk with me about things. So I thought, OK, stop, let's step out here. And my idea at the beginning was that I dedicate the whole year 2009 for making music. In February I got an email from a person I only know very vaguely, a sound artist form Berlin, and he said, ‘do you want to become a professor at the academy of arts here?'. And I thought, uhmmm, I don't know, there's this Sound Studies thing as part of the university, and this whole faculty was in a pretty bad shape. So there was a strong urge from the head of department to get new people in, and just restructure the whole thing. So I became involved in this process. And as a matter of fact I did workshops all the years, and I do like teaching, and I like to explain things to people, and I found working with students a really interesting thing, as they have so many ideas you would never come up with by yourself... so I just ended up becoming professor. And that meant instead of making music I spent most of the year doing university stuff.

D: How much time does it take?

M: Maybe half of my week is teaching... and the other half I try to stay ahead of everything else, like touring, making music, doing the business side of the label, things like that. It feels to me that the teaching aspect of my life will stay there for the next few years at least, and I guess in maybe 3-4 years I will rethink what I'm doing, but it doesn't feel like I'm stopping teaching now, because I just started getting comfortable in my role there. But this of course has implications to my future at Ableton, because one thing is clear, I just cannot go back the way it was before.

D: Was it quite an informal role at Ableton?

M: Kind of free floating. I'm not an official founder, but to a very very high degree I'm a father of this software, and I still like to be involved in the evolution of it, and as a matter of fact 2-3 times a week I'm still involved in discussions with someone from the specifications team, by emails about details, so I'm still involved with it.

D: It still has its hooks in you.

M: Yeah, I have a very strong personal relationship with this thing, and I still have a lot of ideas how to continue with it in the future. So a discussion we have to have very soon is actually how I can contribute in the future. It might come down to a more project-orientated working method.I say, there's this specific thing I want to do for version nine/ten/eleven whatever, and instead of trying to get an overview, where I really try to know what every person in the development is doing, I focus on a few aspects where I know I can really contribute something.

D: Does it feel like an end of an era?

M: No, actually not. I still feel close enough to the development process that it's all good for me.

D: What was your experience in working with electronics before Ableton and also Monolake? Where did all this knowledge come from?

M: I have this classical background of a family of engineers. Everyone in my family worked for Siemens. There's two main things which always caught my interest, and that was abstract art and electronics. From a very young age, I went to art museums in Munich where I came from, and I was always interested in abstract sculpture and paintings. I was never interested in landscapes. I saw a cubist sculpture and I found it cool. And electronics was just the normal thing to do when you are raised in a family of engineers.

D: Did you have synths from a young age?

M: No, because no-one in my family was somehow artistic. And when I felt I liked to have a synthesizer, there was a massive objection from my parents. No-one is musical in our family, and this is way too expensive, and you don't need that, if you think you really want to make music, buy a guitar. And that really was the last thing I wanted to do in the 80s.

D: Why?

M: It represented a culture which just was not mine. I knew I was not interested in Prog Rock, it was just not my world, I was listening to Philip Glass and stuff like that, Kraftwerk, other ideas of what to do musically

D: You got one eventually I hope.

M: Doing stupid jobs like working in a music store and stuff like this, to collect enough money to buy a used Juno 6. And from there on, things started, I played in a pretty gothic band... 86, 87, we were listening to Depeche Mode and Sisters Of Mercy. ... it's really good that it was pre-internet and there's no documentation [laughs]