The SPIN Electronic Dance Music Blog

Raw Detroit unicorn futurism with a ‘Star Trek’ shout-out

Legowelt, a.k.a., Danny Wolfers, is a prolific sort. Slogging away in his studio in the Hague, surrounded by some of the finest (and sometimes buggiest) analog music-making implements known to humankind, he can bang out old-school synth-and-drum jams with the ease of the late Christopher Hitchens reeling off a 1,500-word diatribe about Henry Kissinger, somewhere in between the third and fourth glass of wine. Not that Wolfers necessarily imbibes with the gusto of Hitch, nor ascribes to any of his polemical ideas merely to say that the Dutch producer’s prodigious output means that he can afford to give away some of the goods, every now and then.

He did this a few months back with his album The TEAC Life, a 14-track album of dreamy, dusky, Detroit-inspired techno that he offered as a pay-what-you-wish download from his own website. It’s still available; I donated $10 to his PayPal for it, which seemed more than fair and he’s blessing us again with a new production called “Deep Space Gazing.”

The TEAC Life actually came with a brash sales pitch that Hitchens probably would have appreciated (dodgy punctuation, notwithstanding). “Ok people here it is the new Legowelt album which is free to download for u all,” wrote Wolfers, proceeding to draw a line in the motherfucking sand: “Its got 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 cunt DJs playing a few halfassed dumb mongo beats and being all arty fartsy about it. F*ck that, I am talking about: Raw as fuck autistic Star Trek 1987- Misty Forests- X-FILES,- DETROIT unicorn futurism made on cheap ass digital & analog crap synthesizers recorded in a ragtag bedroom studio on a TEAC VHX cassettedeck in DOLBY C with an unintelligible yet soulfull vivacity.”

(I love that he took the trouble to asterisk out one of his swears, but not the rest.)

“Deep Space Gazing” is a less contentious proposition. Wolfers describes it as “old school U.K rave proto breakbeat techno” sourced from the Commodore Amiga, Roland R-8, and Roland MKS-100, and while I’m in no way capable of verifying his gear list I had to look up the MKS-100 he’s certainly got the description down pat. With a vibe evocative of 808 State, Baby Ford, and early Warp releases, it feels like raving your face off in a remote field deep in the U.K. countryside, complete with an omnipresent layer of tape hiss settling in like frigid dew around your up-all-night feet. It’s lo-fi, hi-concept, and comes with a “mandatory” Star Trek sample.

Get the goods from www.legowelt.com; check out The TEAC Life while you’re at it, and then send him some money. Even unicorn futurists need to eat.

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