When Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles travelled to Hong Kong in 1996 for the International Computer Music Conference, Henke carried a recorder through Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Those field recordings later became part of Monolake’s Hongkong. The closing track, “Mass Transit Railway,” is based on sound captured inside a Hong Kong subway train. The album was produced with instruments including a Prophet VS, Yamaha SY77 and TG77, Ensoniq ASR-10, Waldorf Microwave and an Atari running Notator, alongside a step sequencer Henke wrote in Max.
What interests me is how naturally the city enters the electronic system. The subway recording is not simply atmosphere placed behind a track. It becomes another component in a studio already built from samplers, synthesizers and code.
Sampling a city does something strange to geography. A train journey becomes repeatable. A moment that happened once can be filtered, looped and reorganised twenty years later.
Electronic music can sometimes feel completely synthetic. Hongkong reminds me that a machine-made composition can still contain a very specific street, vehicle and moment in time.
