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If you want to make use of Yamaha’s beloved DX series of FM synthesizers but don’t have the money or the space, Legowelt has you covered with another of his now-legendary sample pack giveaways.
Making a nod to the classic ’90s sci-fi show, ‘The Legowelt DX-Files’ contains “300 artisan FM sounds from various legendary Yamaha DX synthesizers, hand programmed by Legowelt and used in many hit records.” It contains sounds from the Yamaha DX100, TX81Z, DX21, DX7 and DX5 in 16 bit 44khZ WAV format, covering everything from “Ron Hardy Sensation smacked out heroin basses to futuristic ultraspace polar swoooshes.”
You can download the sample pack from Legowelt’s website free of charge, and when you’ve done with those make sure to check out his sample packs for the Korg Mono/Poly and Roland JD-800, and his Clapernicus clap synth for Ableton.
Interview: Legowelt on Wah-Wah Pedals, Manuel Noriega and Couch Mixdowns
Dutch producer Danny Wolfers is a one-of-a-kind music addict, whose lo-fi house and techno concoctions have won him renown over the past decade-plus. Sticking largely with Dutch labels like Bunker, Clone and Crème Organization, Wolfers has built up a formidable discography under a dizzying array of aliases. Lately, though, he’s focused largely on the most popular one: Legowelt. In this edited and condensed lecture from this year’s Bass Camp in Vienna, we spent a bit of time finding out more about the celebrated synth collector.
How was life in The Hague when you were first starting?
When I was 17 it was 1993, so it was the early ’90s and house and techno was something new, very exciting. Especially in The Hague, where you had a weird scene that came out of the squatting movement. Old punk guys did weird acid parties with lots of drugs and lots of stroboscopes and all kinds of things. It was freaky and very different from now I guess, because the whole dance and techno scenes are gentrified. It’s part of normal culture now. It’s not seen as something rebellious. In the early ’90’s, late ’80s, house music was very rebellious, it was something your parents were afraid of.
How did you feel when you went to these parties? Did you feel like part of it or did you feel like an observer, more like the trainspotters standing there and observing?
Yeah, I was definitely an observer because I didn’t go to the parties that much. I was still young and I’d rather spend my time at home making music. It was very intimidating also. People were also a lot more rougher back then I think.
Where did you get your first musical inspirations from?
There were lots of pirate radio stations, illegal radio stations in The Hague and they had all kinds of different electronic music playing. Also, back then, the mainstream media paid attention to it a little bit. For example, MTV back then was very different from what it is now. They actually would have documentaries about the 303 or something and on Saturday night they would have these weird dance show where they would play really obscure, weird stuff like Unit Moebius or really underground stuff with homemade videos with Amiga computer graphics and fractals.
At that time you’ve said that you were fascinated by Unit Moebius. And the funny thing is that you didn’t know where they were from, right?
Yeah, they were actually from The Hague, the same city I lived in. I was very surprised by that, because I thought that house and techno comes from America or maybe Germany, like Frankfurt or Berlin. It was so very exciting.
I suppose Bunker Records was one of the landmarks in your biography. Running into those guys, how did that happen?
I was making music with my friends called Orgue Electronique, and we made a demo tape, still back on cassettes. We just went to a party where Guy Tavares, the boss of Bunker Records was, and we just gave him the tape and then two days later he called us and then we were really happy, “He called us. Wow! Cool, he’s going to release it.” It was an exciting moment.
You eventually created your own label, Strange Life, which had quite an amazing output since it started in 2004.
Yeah. Strange Life started in 2004 and I stopped it in 2010. It existed for six years. It was actually started because I had some ambient music and somebody wanted to have that on a CD. So I made a CDR and gave it to him and I just made a fake catalogue number, Strange Life 001, and then it appeared on Discogs and then I had a label. I just released a lot of weird stuff on it, but then it became too big around 2010. I just stopped it because it took too much time, and it’s not really fun for me to run a label. I’m not born to do those things.
I really like that you always have these stories around your music so that people get the impression that it’s always an imaginary soundtrack. Tell us a bit about those things in life that interest you outside of music that flow into your music.
I think it’s very important that the music has to conjure up some images because this is, of course, a very powerful medium or artform. You can do lots of interesting stuff with the sounds and melodies and structures to massage the imagination of the listener. I used to do that a lot a few years ago. I made a lot of weird concept albums – the weirdest one was probably about Manuel Noriega. I’m trying to move a little bit away from that because if you conceptualize too much maybe the music sobers... Now it’s more free and open.
I read that, like many things in your life, Nacho Patrol started as a joke. You just released it and pretended it was some Ethiopian music from the ’70s. Tell us a bit about Nacho Patrol.
Nacho Patrol is my Afro funk project. I bought a Colorsound Wah-Wah pedal, and then I started making tracks with it immediately. They were like Ethiopian-style Afro funk but also with electronics in it. I just put them on the internet and then I didn’t say I did it. I put it on this internet forum and said, “Yeah, found this record from Africa, it’s really cool.” It was to annoy the record collectors because they have these forums where they would show off their finds. Lots of people believed it, but then the Rush Hour / Kindred Spirits label knew it was me and asked if they could release it. After that, I had a gig where I played before Mulatu Astatke.
Wow! Yeah, that’s like the godfather of Ethiopian music.
It was in Amsterdam and the owner of the label said, “If you’re going to play there you cannot just stand there with a synthesizer. I want you to have a band.” I devised a band, I just got some people I knew together which had never been in a band. One of the guys had just bought a guitar, but he couldn’t play it. He left the band after the first gig.
I was looking on your website to see a bit of the world of Legowelt, and I saw there is software up there. Can you explain what it’s about? I couldn’t get it to work.
Yeah, one of my hobbies is to program software on obsolete computers like the Commodore 64 or TRS80. I’ve heard a lot of people couldn’t get the software you’re talking about to run because to run it you have to press the space bar, which was very common in the ’80s. When you had software to start, you just pressed the space bar. Today, nobody knows that anymore. I figured it out too. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with music, but you can listen to a soundtrack while you use the software. There’s also a program called SPIRICOM 7, which is a program where you can communicate with ghosts in your house.
That’s very useful.
It’s basically like an Ouija board, but then the ghost actually talks to you in English. It is of course just an artificial intelligent thing. He says really scary stuff like... If you type in: “Where are you now?” He’ll then say: “I’m behind you.”
You’re famous for your collection of synthesizers. How many do you have in your studio at the moment?
I think like 20 or something, but I don’t really have a studio in the normal sense. It’s just my house. Each room is ready to make music. It’s more like there are synthesizers in every room.
Kitchen included?
No, not the kitchen. Also not the bathroom either.
Are you a dancer?
Yeah, if there's a good DJ, I can do a few steps. I didn't use to dance that much, but I think it’s quite important if you're a dance producer that you know a little bit about dancing – or that you at least do it or experience parties and go deep into it.
Now I’d like to open it up to the public. Does anyone have any questions?
Audience member #1: Can you talk about your mixdown process? Do you do everything through a board and use outboard equalizers and compression?
I used to do all the mixing outboard with a big mixer, and sometimes I still do it. But the computer technology has become so advanced. I had TL Audio tube mixer and all kinds of compressors, but I sold them all because you can do the same in the computer for a fraction of the cost. If you know what you're doing in the computer, I think that it sounds the same. The living room is where I’m mixing down my tracks right now. I have all my monitor speakers set up before the couch. Instead of watching TV on the couch, I mix down tracks.
Audience member #2: Do you have a favorite hardware synthesizer at home that you like the most?
It changes all the time. Right now I’m really into the Roland JV-2080, which is a digital synthesizer from the ’90s. It’s the same as the Roland JD-800. I just made a sample pack. You can download it at legowelt.org if you don’t have it yet.
With his new album of ‘professional ambient music’ recently self-released via Bandcamp, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to have a good chat with Danny Wolfers. Attack editor Greg Scarth quizzed him on his fantasy synthesisers, space weed from alien planets and why he currently has a complete ninja outfit for sale.
Attack: You’ve described your new Occult Orientated Crime album as ‘professional ambient’ (“not just some jumbled up random chiliwave overcompressed 80s retro soggy biscuit jerkoff”). How do you define professional ambient? And what’s so bad about amateur ambient?
Danny Wolfers: Ah well, you know how it goes, sparking some attention with a write-up like that because by all means the stuff I make is amateur ambient. But maybe amateur ambient is professional ambient in the end! I guess it was just a rant against whatever… You’ve heard those chillwave producers, they just sample some Miami Vice soundtrack or Pat Benatar loop, put like 100,000 compressors over it and say they made it. And then they have a name of someone famous but they change the first letter… how wack is that? So George Michael would be Meorge Gichael and Def Leppard would be Lef Deppard.
It’s like these kids are retarded, they have no fucking imagination. It’s probably because they grew up in the 90s playing PlayStation and Nintendo console video games and didn’t learn to program in BASIC on real computers and stuff. Or their brain is gone because they have to use fake LSD or bad drugs. I dunno what’s going on – I could rant about this all day but I shouldn’t!
What were the influences on this album? You’ve mentioned The Orb and Aphex Twin a lot in the past, but what about more recent ambient music?
There’s a lot of good stuff coming out lately. I really love that Huerco S 19-minute ambient track on Opal Tapes. I don’t think it has a name. It’s spot on – exactly how it should be. Warm, woolly, trippy.
A track which I am obsessed about is Leon Vynehall’s ‘Christ Air’ – that’s like modern deep soul ambient… pure beauty, floating in vaporous space and sensual, one of those tracks you get a bit jealous of ’cause you didn’t make it yourself!
Furthermore, not so new as an artist, but I became obsessed with Morton Feldman. He’s an American composer, probably one of the greatest composers that has ever lived, but not many people know of him. In his later career, before he died in 1986, he had like a surge of incredible genius – it’s like music from another world: so different, fresh. Check out ‘Triadic Memories’ and ‘Coptic Light’ – it’s like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II on DMT.
There is also this guy from Houston, Texas called JD Emmanuel, who calls his music ‘time-travelling music’ – it’s like hardcore new-age heavy trip music… think Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air but then more warmer and woolly.
And how about non-musical influences?
Everything is a non-musical influence: your total self, your surroundings, people, nature, how you feel, the weather, the ions in the air, etc. Sometimes you need to search or explore into dark feelings, maybe where stuff gets on the brink of getting really scary, to squeeze out certain melodies from your brain.
You describe the album as “100% psychedelic drug music with perfectly finetuned selected frequencies to alter your state of mind and take you to complete loss of subjective self-identity”. What were the best drugs you took while making it and what are the best drugs to take before listening to it?
Space weed from an alien planet. You don’t need any drugs to listen to it because the music can do it by itself, but you can of course enhance the experience with certain substances. But what took place at production might be grotesquely execrated in one’s imagination to spark attention and create an ‘arcane’ atmosphere around this album.
Can you speak a little about putting together the sound palette for the album? What were the key instruments, effects and computers this time around?
The key instruments are all over the place – a lot of stuff was used, but not together. Most of the tracks individually are made on just one, two or a maximum of three synthesisers together. Like one track is just the Dave Smith Poly Evolver or Novation Nova. But I particularly used one effect a lot to create this hazy, multi-dimensional wobbling environment and that was the Moog MF-104 analogue delay.
How much does the choice of equipment affect the end result? Would your tracks be completely different if you’d chosen to switch on a different couple of synthesisers on a particular day?
Yes, the synths are the colour palette, the tools of sorcery. Each one has a unique sound or ‘colour’ as I call it. A track like ‘Neolythic Computer’ would not sound the same if I hadn’t used the Novation Nova, for example. I really try to find the character of a synthesiser, its power, its unique features in sound and take that forward and exploit it. Like a type of paint or art medium.
Something you said at LEME last year stuck with me. You said: “In house and techno music, structure is not difficult; you can even have a track with no structure.” That suggests it’s not something you normally pay too much attention to, so how about something like ’Norwegian Raven’? How is the structure of a 38-minute track determined? Is it totally unplanned and jammed?
I know a lot of people who are making music have difficulty with structure, but it’s not that important, I think. The structure in ‘Norwegian Raven’ just came automatically, I didn’t even think of it. It comes naturally, you’ve just got to listen good… it comes down more to a feeling. I wouldn’t say it’s totally unplanned – I mean, you know what you are doing to a certain degree. I think not thinking too much about such stuff is the best way to go – just let it flow from your mind.
If you had the chance to design your own synthesiser or drum machine, what would you create?
I think the world could use a nice ROMpler hybrid again. there are just too many boring, simple analogue synths coming out. Everyone will sound the same: pwowowooooiing blip bleep unimaginative machine music. A lot of these kids don’t even know you can press two notes at the same time, have intervals or even chords – it’s all monophonic boring drabble!
Anyways, the synth would be called the WOLFERS NOSTROMO. It would be a four digital oscillator synth, where the oscillators are digital waveforms, either wave cycles or samples, but 12-bit, maybe even 8-bit. Each of these oscillators goes through its own path of a 24dB filter and extra-warm VCA, with an EQ dip. Then these four paths are mixed together and there is another filter and VCA at the end. And an analogue delay. Also lots of envelopes and LFOs that are freely assignable to the filters, oscillators and VCA, etc.
It would be a bit like a super Ensoniq ESQ-1… all normal stuff, but the character would lie in the digital waveforms, which it would have like a few hundred of. A lot of nature sounds, like noise waves made out of sea sounds, rain, waterfalls. But also storms, thunder and stuff like that. And lots of animal sounds…flute wave cycles made out of bird calls, and raw sounds from bears and howling wolves. A lot of ethnic instruments but also normal waveforms of course.
It would have a JX-3P/Elektron Analog Four-esque polyphonic step sequencer with pattern memory, an arpeggiator and chord memory. If any synth company wants to make this synthesiser and make a lot of money, give me a call. I will oversee and endorse this product. Maybe we can restart the Welsh synthesiser industry and reopen Cheetah marketing.
A lot of the time when you talk about your early electronic music experiences it seems to be things like listening at home to radio and tapes rather than going to clubs. How about now? Do you go to clubs much when you’re not DJing?
Yeah, sometimes to check out friends or interesting people playing and I like to dance, but not really to listen to music in a way that you can hear everything, because in clubs the music is always loud and you don’t really hear all the nuances of the music. People are talking and there is other stuff going on. I guess going to the club is like going to church but then you are not a Christian but a techno person, or house or whatever.
Do you think less club-focused electronic music has been pushed into a niche because of the focus on club experiences? Is it harder to make labels take a chance on non-dancefloor music?
Most labels sell records which are basically DJ tools, they sell for club use. The Occult Orientated Crime Album would never work on vinyl; first of all you would need six LPs to fit all the music on in acceptable, decent sound quality… The ‘Norwegian Raven’ track wouldn’t even fit on one side of a record. It would cost a label tremendous amounts of money and not a lot of people would buy it because its not a DJ tool or music with a beat. But besides that the vinyl format also wouldn’t be able to play all the frequencies that are present in the music itself. It would be a weak, watered-down copy of the original. The solution to this is of course to produce shorter tracks!
You told me that you prefer DJing to playing live because there’s less pressure. What kind of pressure do you feel when you play live?
Well, it’s normal: if you are performing of course there is pressure. When you DJ you mostly don’t play your own music, so if a record isn’t received well by the audience you don’t have to blame it on yourself. OK, you’re still playing the track but at least you didn’t produce it… and you can easily just put on another record.
Some people are motivated by pressure. Is that not you?
No, it works the other way around. If something or someone pressures me too much or nags me too much it will have the opposite effect, like I will lose interest or just don’t do something.
How do you feel about being described as ‘weird’? You seem pretty normal to me.
In the mostly mundane, colourless world of techno music it isn’t so hard to be seen as weird or ‘eccentric’ if you’re not some boring artistic wanker or shallow hipster expat from Berlin or something.
Neville Watson told me you’re a big fan of Danny Dyer and that you like watching British TV dramas like Midsomer Murders. Was he winding me up?
I have no clue who Danny Dyer is. I don’t think I have ever seen Midsomer Murders. I only know that one with the old guy, some kind of conservative old git wearing a small hat. I used to watch that one, it was kind of sad… and I like that Belgian guy detective series for old people, Poirot, that’s just great… this slow meditative tempo it has.
I’m always excited if I play at Fabric in London because the hotel they put the artists in is right across from the Florin Court building, which is where he lives! (Well, not in real life but in the series.) Also, a few years ago, I think in 2011 when the BLOC festival was in Minehead, they put us in a hotel in the quaint and beautiful village of Dunster, Somerset, on the old square. I immediately recognised it – it’s where this Poirot episode ‘The Cornish Mystery’ took place. Then we would walk around imagining I was Poirot and my friend Orgue Electronique was Captain Hastings, or the other way around. I guess I rather would be Captain Hastings – he seems like a guy that hasn’t got any problems and lives in some kind of naive fairytale bubble.
How’s your martial arts training going?
The other day I ordered a ninja outfit, like a real professional one. It has everything – even those little socks – but the outfit is too big for me so if anyone needs a ninja outfit for a 1.9 to 2-metre tall person let me know.
In the new Shadow Wolf zine there’s a list of ‘hot producer tips’ from S Hadowwolf and DJ Overdose. What’s the best production tip you’ve heard recently?
Well people always come up with interesting angles and tips. A good one I heard from my friend Jimi Voltagio is if you are mixing down tracks you should put the mix down in mono mode, somehow you can make a much clearer mix down that way.
Shadow Wolf draws on the early internet cyber zines. What was your own first experience of the internet? When did you first get involved in it?
In the early 90s I got a 2,400-baud modem for the Amiga and started to roam around on the BBSs. There were a lot of BBSs connected to electronic music somehow, and then I already had started to get into producing. Through the BBSs I would actually meet some people who helped me with equipment and stuff. One of them was the Random XS guy from Utrecht who used to record for Djax-Up-Beats and had his own label too, called U-TRAX records. That was truly a great label – lots of different great music came out there, from Connection Machine to Fanon Flowers.
If Doggerland still existed you could drive from The Hague to Ipswich in about three hours, traffic permitting. How would you take advantage of that incredibly convenient access to East Anglia?
It would probably be a province of Holland then and you wouldn’t have to deal with your perfidious politicians and royal family. I am not sure if the Dutch version is any better, but you could at least smoke weed in relative freedom. And your houses wouldn’t be so grimly brown coloured, and you would drive on the normal side of the road. And you would have a better football team.
What style of music are you going to make next? You said something about ‘Ethiopian techno’…?
Well I kinda did that with Nacho Patrol, using Ethiopian jazz scales and stuff like that. I would like to delve a little deeper into Ethiopian music – it’s really fascinating how they use certain scales for certain moods. It’s very mysterious, like alien music or music from man’s ancient forgotten past.
I’m currently working on a new ambient album which is going to be called RISING SUN SYSTEMS – OBERHEIM SPACE, which uses, as the title suggests, mainly the Oberheim Matrix synthesiser and a lot of ancient Japanese scales. These Japanese scales really fit the Matrix, which has a warm, crystal, almost koto-esque magic to it. There is also a bit of G-funk vibes in it. It’s going to be a very melodic and trippy album… if I say so myself.
The irrepressible and idiosyncratic Dutchman has found time in his packed schedule of programming games, writing e-zines and collecting synths to make one of th ...
The irrepressible and idiosyncratic Dutchman has found time in his packed schedule of programming games, writing e-zines and collecting synths to make one of the best records of his long career. Angus Finlayson meets him at home in The Hague.
Danny Wolfers will be the first person to admit that his music doesn’t really fit anywhere. People hear different things in it at different times. Lately, through affiliation with labels like L.I.E.S., he’s been linked to the recent trend for grubby, idiosyncratic takes on house; back in the early 2000s his track “Disco Rout” was swept up in the burgeoning electro revival. The one constant, arguably, is his hometown. The Hague isn’t exactly renowned for its thriving cultural life but, since his earliest releases in the late nineties, Wolfers has maintained close ties with the city’s various crews—first the legendary Bunker Records, an outgrowth of the squat scene that was responsible for bringing techno to The Hague; and then their equally punkish successors, Creme Organization.
The latter will be releasing Wolfers’ latest album, Crystal Cult 2080. It’s not his first—far from it—but it might well be his best, a poignant retro-futuristic techno record which balances a deep knowledge of its Detroit and Chicago heritage with a melodic sense that is Wolfers’ own. The title is partly taken from an overlooked digital synth, the Roland JV2080, which Wolfers says formed the backbone of the album. It seems fitting that, in an era when everyone else is salivating over vintage analogue gear, he has developed an obsession with the digital castoffs of the nineties.
When I visit the producer at his home by the beach, on one of the first sunny days of the year, everything is just as you’d expect. We chat over morning coffee, amongst the rows of synths that fill his living room. There are leafy potted plants dotted about and garish hangings on the walls. When I go to use the bathroom there’s a copy of Retro Gamer perched precariously on the sink. It’s easy to imagine him chipping away at his various projects here—not just making music, but programming games, publishing e-zines and posting up helpful guides to his various synth acquisitions. Wolfers’ particular brand of geekery was born in a very specific time—the early nineties, when pre-internet Bulletin Boards (or BBSes) were giving a handful of enthusiasts a glimpse of the interconnected future that awaited them. Nowadays, his eagerness to share, enlighten and entertain puts most of us web natives to shame.
When I was young I didn’t go to clubs at all. I’d just make music in my room. The first time I went to a club I was 16 or something, there was µ-Ziq—Mike Paradinas—playing in Amsterdam, at the Paradiso. So I went there all by my own, because all my friends weren’t at all into electronic house or techno music. They listened to like Top 40 music, and they thought I was crazy being into this kind of music—that I was very weird.
How old were you when you encountered the Bunker guys and what they were doing in the Hague?
Uh, I guess a few years later—it was like in the middle of the 1990s. So, like, 18, 19, 20 or something. It was very fascinating for me, of course. Because I didn’t know that in The Hague there was a scene around the music I liked and was interested in, which was more the Detroit, Chicago kind of weird stuff. In Holland you [usually] had Mellow and Gabber music.
The two extremes.
Yeah, that was it. And nothing in between for, like, the biggest part of the population. But then I found those people, and they were very interesting people—they influenced me a lot.
Did they do regular parties that you could go to?
Yeah. The boss of Bunker would have weird parties, and me and my friend Brian, Orgue Electronique—who I started collaborating with musically—we would play at these parties. We met them—Guy Tavares and Inter-Ference [of Bunker]—in a party in The Hague in 1996. I’m not sure, I think I-F was DJing and Autechre was playing or something. So we would watch those kind of shows, you know? Quite often those kind of electronic bands or DJs would play in The Hague.
The Bunker guys came out of the squat scene, that was their background, right?
Some of them, yeah.
So when you played at these parties, did they have an atmosphere that you maybe didn’t get from parties in Amsterdam?
I guess in Amsterdam you had those parties too, it was just more freaky—a lot of weird stuff could happen. It wasn’t like a commercial club—there was no real laws to behave, no security. So all kinds of different people would come there, from really artistic people to plain criminals, you know—from the obscure weird people, people with a lot of psychiatric problems, and also young school kids, and sort of rich flamboyant people. It was a very weird mix. And basically people would take a lot of drugs there. So they would pretty much flip out. Sometimes it went completely wrong I guess, but I never really experienced it, I only heard those stories. It kind of still exists—there’s a place in The Hague where Guy of Bunker still does parties, called Dystopia. And you just pay one entrance fee and then everything is free the whole night, and there’s stroboscopes and a very dark atmosphere. But it’s way more jovial these days, I think.
So you encountered the Bunker guys in the mid-late nineties. How did that whole scene change as the nineties moved into the 2000s?
This whole The Hague scene started as weird techno and acid house. And that went faster and faster and it almost went into tekno—with a “k”—like Spiral Tribe style, really crazy, drugged-up stuff. Then I guess there was an explosion—too much happened with the people of Bunker Records. Not with me because I was just a schoolboy, you know—very well-behaved. I was just playing with synthesizers and drum machines and programming computers. But this whole thing kind of exploded. I guess people got psychotic or… so then it stopped for a short time. And then Bunker re-emerged, like a phoenix, as an electro label, but like real dark electro-funk. That’s when the Bunker 3000 series started. And that was like a completely new sound. Of course it was based on a very old, early eighties sound, kind of. And then you had the whole electro revival of the early 2000s, and all of this rode on that wave of success.
You had quite a bit of success around that time with the track “Disco Rout”, which was signed to Ghostly and then licensed to Cocoon. People who’ve come to your music recently might be surprised by those connections. Did you feel like crowds at that time didn’t quite know what to make of you?
I never had any problems with Cocoon as a label, because I did a release with Cocoon quite recently again. They’re very nice people to work with, and Sven Väth is a very good DJ, and plays interesting stuff. But of course there was—I had no clue what this thing was about. When the “Disco Rout” thing was going on, we were booked to play at these big German techno raves for quite a lot of money, but I had no clue what to play there. I would bring the Bunker crew with me, and Guy Tavares would play acid tracks, and then Orgue Electronique, he couldn’t really DJ at all—nor could I—we’d play Italo disco, for example. And of course it was a bit weird at those parties. We might have only played those parties five times, and the word got around that we were kind of a strange bunch. But my music overlaps a lot of different scenes, I think. You cannot pigeonhole it into one scene. Sometimes I get to know or play at weird parties. I even played at a reggae festival one time—I have no clue why. Or, like, an industrial goth festival. That doesn’t happen that much but in the early 2000s it was very common that we would play at a goth festival. I even played in support for a band called Alphaville. All kinds of strange worlds everywhere.
I wanted to talk about the new album. It has this really dreamy sound, there’s a foggy, misty quality to it that’s really nice. Is that down to this synth, the JV2080?
Well, the JV2080 was the de facto pop production synth of the 1990s, so it can also sound really poppy and clear. I think the fogginess comes mainly because there’s bucketloads of delay, old analogue fuzzy effects over it—either real ones or simulated in the computer.
What’s the appeal of that synth? Why did you find yourself working with it so much?
Well, because nowadays everybody is into analogue stuff. And all these brands are making analogue stuff—like Korg. For me that stuff is very boring, because in the nineties I had that stuff—we had that stuff because it was cheap. We wanted to have samplers, and we wanted to have a Kurzweil K2000 or a Roland W-30 workstation. But we didn’t have the money. So we got this cheap analogue stuff, that’s very expensive now. So recently, two years ago, I bought that JV2080 synthesizer. And it’s just a very nice-sounding thing, and you can do so much with it, there’s so many different worlds you can explore with it. For these times, such a synthesizer’s very different from what other people are using. It sounds, I guess, more exotic. For me it’s more fun to work with such a machine, than to have a [Korg] MS-20 with only like a [mouths rudimentary synth sound], you know?
Are these things cheap now, as well? Digital synths?
Yeah, the digital synthesizers are the cheapest synths you can get. You can get cool ones for 50 euros—that cost a lot of money in the nineties.
I enjoyed reading your zine, Order of the Shadow Wolf, the other week. Why did you decide to do that?
I don’t really remember anymore. Uh, I think I wrote most of the whole thing under the influence, on drugs, one afternoon.
Did you read these .txt zines in the nineties?
Yeah, yeah, BBSes and stuff. I thought when I released [the zine] nobody would have a clue what it was, because for somebody that’s been on computers after—when did the internet kick in—1996, say… and even before then, people that were on BBSes were only a handful. So I thought, “Nobody is going to understand this,” but it was received quite well, to my surprise. There might be a second edition soon—I hope this month, else April.
So the BBS thing. This was way before my time. How did it work?
Well if you had a computer, you bought a dial-up modem and you connected that to your telephone outlet, and then you typed in the number on the computer and it would call somebody’s house, who had a computer with the BBS on it. And there were kind of forums on those BBSes, like proto-forums. Because this is a pretty cyberpunk style, these BBSes, futuristic people were on there. So of course there were a lot of people who listened to electronic music. So there were specialized BBSes about electronic music. You know, people had their hobby and made a BBS about it. Normal magazines didn’t really say much about, for example, Underground Resistance, but there were BBSes that had information about it, like a whole discography of Underground Resistance in .txt format. And it was very fascinating as an adolescent to look at that. And you had people you could talk to about it.
And was this all people in the Netherlands you were talking to, or was it worldwide?
Well, mostly in the Netherlands, because it was still pretty localized. Because you had to call—even calling outside the city was very expensive, so you would try to have a local call. Or maybe call Amsterdam, which was more worldly, so you might find a more interesting BBS there. Back then, I met people on there—the guy from Delsin Records, for example. And we used to trade tapes with our own music, or music we’d bought in the record store, we’d record the vinyl. Then I’d call these people I’d never seen before—we’d call and talk about music. At school here I didn’t know anybody who was into the same music. So it was very exciting for me to be able to communicate with these people.
What’s your view on the relationship between electronic music and the internet these days? Plenty of people will say that it’s damaging to electronic music now—perhaps because people can pirate music, or because online spaces are being prioritized over physical club spaces.
Well I think it’s great—it’s one of the key, how do you call it, pillars of electronic music. Especially in its cyberpunk ethos, you know? They go hand in hand, on so many levels. But the whole world is on the internet now, so it’s useless talk to think that it’s damaging. Maybe it’s damaging certain parts, but the positive sides are so immense. So I guess I never think about it like that. I’m quite active on the internet, like a lot of people. I have my own homepage and e-zine, all those little things always.
These projects besides your music seem like a big part of your activities—aside from the e-zine you’ve programmed games, you make sample packs, you write about your synths on the site. As a professional musician, you must have in the back of your mind that the way you earn your money is to make music and perform. So how do you find the time to do this other stuff? How do you strike a balance between these two things?
Well I think it’s also important to do that other stuff. As an artist, I think these things are a little bit extra you can give the audience. And they seem to appreciate it. And it’s just fun to do. It’s also – if you’re making music all day you get crazy, so it’s nice to some days just fiddle about with the synthesizer, record some useless loops as a demonstration and make some pictures of the synthesizer and write something about it. Because it’s part of my culture, you know? I present not only music, but also the whole world behind it. When I was a boy or an adolescent and I would see these things that are on my site now, I would be very excited. It’s like the BBS thing—like little news clippings and weird stuff everywhere. So I do that because I think people will be excited about it. ~
We Caught Up With Legowelt, Techno's Favourite Mystical Weirdo
e's one of the most innovative, hard-working and consistent producers working in techno today, but Legowelt is also - maybe necessarily - one of the oddest, too. He runs a cyberpunk e-zine, owns so many synths that his Hague home is fit to bursting with them, and his new album Crystal Cult 2080 is inspired (in part) by 9th century Medieval ritual chanting and polyphonic rhythms. No big deal.
We absolutely love Crystal Cult 2080 at THUMP, so we caught up with the Dutch producer to chat about his influences, practises, and if techno can still be a rebellious sound.
THUMP: Your music as Legowelt has always had an active interest in mysticism and the occult, and it’s probably it’s most overt on Crystal Cult 2080. What about it all is attractive to you as a producer?
Legowelt: Music itself is, of course, very mystic. It has always been used in mystic rites. If you look at house and techno music, it’s a kind of occult - from a certain perspective. People try to get entranced or take certain substances to get into a higher dimension.
How does this work for you in practise though?
Legowelt: Musical notes and certain frequencies work on your brain in a certain way. It’s occult because people don’t really know what’s really going on, but they're compelled by it. As you can hear on the album, there are strong influences from Medieval music. In the Western world - around the 9th century I believe – they started using polyphonic music in Christian churches. That music came from the east, and was used to influence you to the point of being in a trance-like state.
Conveying this then, do you think the trance-like state your techno works towards in quite an inward experience? It doesn't sound like you're aiming for much of a collective, dance floor vibe.
Legowelt: It’s inwards, definitely. This album should be an inward experience.
How do you think you've translated these ancient ideas into modern techno?
Legowelt: The drums are a more stylistic translation that I put into the music, but Medieval music was also very simple in rhythm. It was just one drum playing the same pattern all the time, so it’s not that difficult to make a transition to a more modern-sounding thing. They’re very similar. Techno music is a little bit faster, and it’s made with electronic instruments, but in the end, it’s pretty much the same. Techno should be simple.
And the chanting on the album too. Lines like "Drink from the chalice, and you will be reborn".
Legowelt: In certain tracks, definitely. That's a Medieval kind of chanting. That "Drink from the chalice" line is a sample from the Excalibur movie. That’s a nice old-school rave style sample; if you hear it in the club, you cam drink from the chalice and be reborn through techno music.
How did you find the sample? Are you a fan of the film?
Legowelt: I was talking with TLR (the owner of the Crème Organization label), joking around about music, and we said it would be cool to take a sample from that movie.
Do you discuss your music with friends as you're making it; take suggestions, play material to them?
Legowelt: Occasionally, but not on a very intense level. Sometimes an idea is born when talking or hanging out, like “Oh, it would be funny to make a track about this and that”. It's more for details like track selection and order. There’s always an element of influence by other people, however. Ideas and concepts often sneak into the music subconsciously.
I know you named the album after the digital synth that you used to make it. You flit between analogue and digital synths a lot these days. What attracted you to that particular synth for this album?
Legowelt: That’s difficult to say. I like when music is very.... unclear. It’s nice when you walk down the street and it’s foggy. Your imagination works differently because you cannot see things clearly; only shadows and outlines. If you use a lot of misty, foggy effects - like old delays, reverbs and filters - the music becomes more shadowy. You can still hear the melodies, but they’re a little more buried - and you can start to pick out how the counter-melodies interact with other melodies. I would hope it makes it more exciting to listen to. The listener can discover secret melodies, and their imagination can be tested.
For me, it really doesn’t matter what you use to make music because inside the hardware there’s a computer chip too. That whole hardware vs software, digital vs analogue thing, it's completely not important for me. The way I see it? They’re all instruments. I think purism is a very bad thing, because then you confine yourself too much. Purism can be a dead end.
What have you been influenced by musically in the making of Crystal Cult 2080?
Legowelt: Well, a lot of Detroit stuff, definitely. My track 'Experiential Awakening' is very much influenced by the Detroit sounds of DJ Stingray. I listen to a lot of Actress. I enjoy how he uses melodies. It’s very weird. He also has this foggy, misty vibe to his music. There are a lot of influences from Aphex Twin’s old sound, too. If you listen to certain tracks - especially his early 90s tracks, where he used break beats and the R8 Roland drum machine - you can hear those influences in my music quite well, I think. His melodies are really good. They seem quite fragmental. Huerco S also has that same vibe where he has fragmentary melodies. It just stops and starts - then disappears. Some of the tracks seem very harmonic in the way the melodies go. I find all of them very interesting.
How do you think the new album differentiates itself from your last one, The Paranormal Soul?
Legowelt: The tracks are more detailed. As the melodies go, they’re a bit more advanced. The last album was mainly just a dance floor album, and this one goes a little deeper. The production is also a bit, woolier.
I know you made most of the album in different places across an extended period of time. The album does sound very cohesive though. What's your routine like, when you have an idea for a track?
Legowelt: When it’s recorded somewhere else, I just make a sketch. The end stage was done here in my home studio, which explains why it all sounds coherent. How the melodies work, and the certain vibe of a track, I can still do that in a hotel room, on a computer, with one machine.
Is that quite typical of your work then, grabbing ideas and laying them down in the moment?
Legowelt: I enjoy doing that because I always have this urge. When I’m chilling in the hotel room, I just get the machines out and start jamming.
For you live show too, are you going to focus on the synth you used to produce the album, or switch it up between analogue and digital again?
Legowelt: That depends on where I play, and if I can bring a synthesiser. Sometimes I take an analogue synth with me, sometimes a digital synth, and sometimes it’s just the laptop with the controller. It all depends on how I feel, and what the club situation is.
Do you think that the aesthetics and sounds of the occult is a way of putting across techno as a rebellious or counter-cultural kind of music still, after it's become a more commercial genre?
Legowelt: Of course it existed already in the 80s, with Psychic TV. They also had a very mystical culture around their music, which is very interesting. They had the Temple of Psychic Youth. I guess that influenced this whole mystical, occult vibe around it, and that was very counter-cultural back then. I think that if any kind of music has a culture around it, then it’s mysterious. I don’t think of it being a counter-culture or a rebellious thing. It’s just the music that I make. I can imagine how it would be rebellious, because it’s against the normal pedestrian ways of thinking. I guess that’s what I’ve always been, to a certain degree.
What do you think techno needs to do to keep pushing forward?
Legowelt: There should always be people that push it further, or do stuff that other people don’t do. Who just do their own stuff, and not be influence by peer pressure from the outside. I guess that’s the main thing of being rebellious. Do something you want yourself - that comes from within yourself - and don’t pay too much attention to what others think about it and say. You should just, do it.
You always seem to treat music as a labour of love. Your output is crazy, and you must work constantly. What do you think the climate of electronic music production is like right now, particularly with the immense ease and access within software and social networks?
Legowelt: It’s a very good thing, because if you want to make music now you can start within a week because everything is on the internet. There’s video manuals, how to operate a synthesiser, how to sequence music – you can train yourself within a week. You’ve got so many connections with social media and forums, there’s a place for everybody where they can just hang out and grow. I guess almost every artist that’s come out in the last 15 years. Their career started on the Internet.
Do you think that's overly positive?
Legowelt: I don’t see why it wouldn’t it positive. There’s not much of another way. There are labels that only press on vinyl and only sell in records stores, but it’s through the internet that people know about it. It’s just an essential part of everybody’s life right now. I wouldn’t see any other way.
Here's the second film we shot, centered around Dutch producer Danny Wolfers - best known as Legowelt and several other aliases. Wolfers might have an encyclopaedic knowledge of dance music, and the "freaked deep music" that he pursues as Legowelt is firmly dedicated to the melodic soul of classic Detroit, Chicago machine-funk and the rest of it, but he never seems to forget that having a sense of humour goes a long way.
He described his 2011 album The Teac Life as "a hella lot deep tape saturated forest-techno tracks on it and when I say Techno i dont mean that boooooooooooring contemporary shit they call techno nowadays with overrated tallentless pretentious douchebag tnuc DJs playing a few halfassed dumb mongo beats and being all arty fartsy about it", and frankly, that's enough for us to love him forever. We talked about how Holland's musical city's differ and interact, why Ibiza sucks and more.
Wolfers is the ultimate synth head. I've seen his live set a couple times and it's magic.
Tracks like How I Live or Moonmist move a crowd in a way that the best selectors
can't touch.
Aphex Twin actually took inspiration from the Den Haag acid scene that birthed Legowelt.
Agent 47 wrote:Next time I can think of something, I will.
Lye_Form wrote:You dont think his musics really good?
He has written some masterpieces imo. I rate him similarly to aphex twin.
As it now stands, I'd put him a level below Aphex (and Square), but we're talking the very top of the scale there. The dude's got a trillion songs, maybe I haven't come across his best stuff yet? Also of note, in the late 90's I kind of burned out on techno. Like honest to goodness danceable techno. I can still get down with listening techno, to an extent. From BoC, Aphex, and Square, the synth/melody/harmony stuff is incredible, but the beats, the drums are really incredible, and from what I've heard, Lego is not there, his focus lies more in the synths and he seems to accept uninspired techno drums.
BUT
I don't know what I'm talking about! So, maybe post up a few of your favorite tracks of his? You got anything that is spacial, harmonically interesting with highly crafted drums? Psychedelic?
When did he emerge, though? I was off the planet from 2003-2007, people try to talk to me about stuff that happened then, but I have to demure.
He obviously isn't as an important figure in the scheme of things as squarepusher or aphex but musically hes one of the best in electronic music imo.
His drums are great, has really nice swing on his hats at times, really nice raw tones to the drums (prob as he has so many drum machines). some of his tunes the drums are really understated though (seemly on purpose to focus on other things). But the subtly is always there.
Mostly its not overly catchy or in your face 'wow', its brilliant as it feels kinda honest and raw. Also feels quite cinematic at times which is sick.
