Field Records Opens Monolake Reissue Series With ‘Interstate’

Field Records has launched its Monolake reissue program with the first vinyl pressing of Interstate, the 1999 album that closed a specific chapter for the project and foreshadowed tools that would reshape electronic music production. The record is the last to feature Gerhard Behles alongside Robert Henke; that same year, Behles co-founded Ableton with Henke and software engineer Bernd Roggendorf, making Interstate both an artistic statement and a waypoint.

The album emerged from a pre-millennial Berlin where programming students at Technische Universität were writing music in Max, treating the software as an instrument rather than a utility. Interstate distills that inquiry into dense dub techno and ambient electronica. Its eight tracks move through gaseous rhythmic cycles, synthetic chirps meshed with birdsong-like bleeps, and abstracted drum and bass geometries. The duo’s sound design worked across club, home listening, and headphone space without settling fully into any one.

This reissue returns a record that mapped a path from academic computer music to a broader scene. Tracks like “Abundance” and “Tangent I” still sound less like fixed compositions than systems in motion—an early sketch of ideas that would later become embedded in software used globally. Field Records’ series continues with reissues of Hong Kong and the forthcoming Gravity, but Interstate claims its place as a document of a moment when code, club culture, and the edges of ambient music briefly aligned.