Ableton Live. Monolake. One of these things is more famous than the other, it's fair to say.

In the mid-'90s Berlin producers Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles created some exquisite music that mixed the dub-techno of their label bosses Rhythm & Sound with passages of environmental recordings made on their travels. Their debut album Hong Kong and the electronic cicada clouds of the huge Gobi hold up incredibly well in a genre not renowned for longevity.

But somewhere along the way their musical output got overshadowed by another kind of creation: a bit of software called Ableton Live. Fed up with the tools available to them for making music, the Monolake boys started work on software that would give them the immediacy of interaction from a computer usually associated with physical synths and drum machines. The result suddenly became a commercial proposition, a company was formed, and now Live has become the de facto standard for dance music production, performance and laptop DJing.

The music has kept developing too. While Behles has focused on Live, Henke has pushed on solo with Monolake performances and recordings. They've built up a body of work which has kept the sound palette of dubbed-out techno -- icy synth chords and absurdly deep bass -- but moved away from metronome-like beats into more electro rhythms.

More recently Henke has been joined by another '90s Berlin techno graduate, Torsten Pröfrock aka T++. Their first album of material working together, 2005's Polygon Cities, shows a diversity of sounds and feels, while still being consistent with what's come before. CCTV shows the influence of T++'s dubstep leanings, while the bright, plastic-wrapped chords of Axis nod towards electro and the bass drone of Wasteland pulls the mood somewhere darker.

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