In conversation with Legowelt

The Dutch DJ and producer, Legowelt has spent decades carving out an enigmatic space for himself in the world of electronic music – where analog synths hum alongside spectres of failed utopias and cyberpunk fantasies that unfold in translucent, lo-fi textures. A native of the 90’s Hague squat rave scene, his sound is a fantastical mix of acid, electro, idm, trance, and deep house. Haunting synthetic notes are incredibly valuable for the artist – the synthesizer is his brush to paint on a canvas made up of waveforms and grids. Beyond his sonic discography, Legowelt pursues the act of storytelling through homemade softwares and surrealist illustrations. Legowelt remains a champion of imperfection—where each dusty drum machine and warbled synth line tells a story of its own.

Prior to his appearance on Glamcult TV, we got to have a conversation and dive deep into Legowelt’s initiation into electronic music, fantasy drum machines, and a deep love for synthesizers as both tools and works of art.

Hi! How are you doing?
Ok, I have been working on my new animation film this morning which will be the sequel to my Ambient Trip Commander film from 2022. So that’s on my mind now…it is a project I have been obsessed with a lot lately…the film is hopefully finished in 2026. I have to focus on this interview now which is more about the music side of things anyway, let’s go ha-ha.

Sounds very exciting, how is the project going?
I try to work on it a few mornings every week, something different from making music. Working on it is like being in deep meditation with lots of hyperfocus. After spending time in this fictional animation world drawing frames and colouring, it always feels a bit melancholic to come back into the real world – working on the film is like a second alternate reality I dwell in. When I draw the locations and characters it’s almost like I am there. It’s constantly on my mind, the story gets developed while I work on the film.

So nice! If we circle back to the first alternate reality, how did you get into electronic music production?
I was studying animation at HKU in Utrecht and there was a vibrant cool scene of all the different art school directions coming together. To be in this creative environment with like-minded people was great. I was already making music in high school in The Hague but I was pretty much on my own, most people there thought it was weird that I was trying to make electronic music, the most edgy thing they would listen to was probably something like Weezer or Sound Garden. So then suddenly I  enter this world where people know what Detroit Techno is, what a TB303 is, who Aphex Twin is etc. I suddenly could talk about music, synthesizers, and cyberpunk stuff for hours with other people. We started making videos, music, albums, and art performances –  all completely free-floating experiments. One of the people I would hang out with a lot was Marcus Graf, a Dutch German artist who was studying Music Technology. He was in this band called Normally Invisible back then, nowadays he does this band Poison Lolly with the singer Mariëlle Pronk.

And where does the alias “Legowelt” come from?
Somewhere in 1997, we were organising a small event in the Sowieso in The Hague, a very laidback underground bar. I needed an artist name for the flyer so Marcus came up with Legowelt. I thought this had a nice electronic vibe to it, maybe because it is German, and also simple and efficient like the name Kraftwerk for example. In the end, it is just an artist name I still use after almost 30 years.  There isn’t much deep philosophical meaning behind the name, the deeper meaning is in the music itself of course and that is for people to discover.

Your sound blends aspects from house music, rhythmic bass and drifting melodies, and synth-pop—it paints a futuristic club scene…how would you describe your sonic presence?
My music comes from many different directions. I am influenced by all sorts of genres. In my head I  don’t consider myself a  ‘house’ or ‘techno’ or even ‘electro’ artist, I will throw these terms around when people ask what music I make just to get it over with. It is difficult to explain what I do. It is an amalgam of so many different genres that are folded, or better said, melted into my soup.. On a certain given day, I will listen to Eddy Grant’s “Time Warp”, Suicide’s “Harlem”, Model 500’s “Future”, “Rai” from Rachid Baba Ahmed, Memphis Rap, Schlager, Medieval music, and lots more. All that stuff gets fermented in my head and when I am in the studio it pours out with no rules…no genre boundaries.

I think that in ‘the field’ this sonic presence gets affirmed because there are fans from lots of different directions, from all sorts of scenes, different ages, and cultures. On a weekend I might be playing a techno club night, the next day a goth wave fest, then a Psytrance carnival, and then I close it all on Sunday playing a Reggae Dub festival. I find it really cool that my music is accepted in different scenes, it keeps making music fun and exciting because I get influenced by the other artists, and the things I see and hear at those events – not always the same boring techno beats….

That’s so beautiful, a symbiotic sonic enrichment! From what I gathered, synthesizers are very important for you. When did you start experimenting with synthetic sound, and what pushed you to it?
What pushed me into taking this path is a difficult question to answer, there are many facets to this. Simply said it was a calling. When I was around 14, I became obsessed with Detroit Techno (especially Underground Resistance), Rephlex, Warp, Chicago Acid house, Tresor, and Gabber – basically, all electronic music had my interest, even weird New Age music CDs that I would find in my Uncles music collection. When you are at that age you have a mystical driving force, partly to rebel; back then this music was completely new, exciting, and something revolutionary. I had zero interest in guitars or starting a band, I wanted to make electronic music. There was this DIY punk attitude in this whole electronic music thing too. It was very much possible to make a record with cheap equipment – all you needed was a Commodore Amiga computer with a sampling cartridge, some cracked software, a cheap mixer, maybe a synth and drum machine, and a cassette tape to record it on to. You didn’t even need to make a record, just copy some tapes and distribute them yourself. This thing becomes your life, a total obsession. And the synthesizers are, especially when you are at that age, magical mystical mysterious devices that can create sound out of electricity and transistor chips. Sounds that are not in nature yet. The whole art of creating new complex sounds that haven’t existed before is like some alchemistic wisdom or quantum physical waveform stuff you are trying to unfold. Furthermore, another fascination is that synthesizers are cultural phenomena, pieces of art created to make art. They are not just mass-produced commodities per se. Every synth model has the touches of the designer, little quirks, and a vision they had. They are machines designed to create culture, new scenes, new worlds, a new future. It’s something new for people to enjoy, very much the opposite of something like guns for example.

Synthesizers as works of art and a medium is fascinating – which one is your favorite at the moment?
I always like weird unpopular digital synths or even things like home keyboards. Like the Kawai K4 and Yamaha SY35, instruments that can make very alien sounds. I made a lot of sample packs with those synths among many others that you can download for free.  In the past 30 years, I have worked with many many different synthesizers. There are legendary famous synths like the Jupiter 8 and Prophet 5 which I use a lot in my studio, but for me, they are more or less workhorses,  because they do their thing so well and you can get beautiful sounds from them instantly. The fun and excitement for me starts with synths people don’t understand or say that are stupid. Then my interest is provoked and I want to know why these synths are so bad. It’s a bit like synthesizer anthropology.

A modern secret weapon and a very fun instrument to work with for me is the Casio CT-S1000V, which has this horrible gimmicky speech synthesizer. Now I never use that speech synthesizer, after you use that two times you’ve heard it all. The real magic is that it has a really interesting synth, well you can’t really call it a synthesizer, it’s more of a home keyboard engine with lots of cool sounds and drums that you can mangle with some very interesting effects. It has a powerful arpeggiator, if you put this arpeggiator over a drum sound bank and play the keyboard you get the wildest never heard before rhythms. Put some effects over it and you might invent a new music style.

“Trance Lego Highway” just came out, congrats! You dive deeper into a utopian landscape with this track, the four-to-the-floor bass combined with the distorted voice and synth merges elements of ghetto house, IDM, and trance. Can you tell me more about the creative process behind the track?
I had to think a bit about this question because I didn’t know what it was about, but then I realised this is on Spotify, probably, something I never check or post about and labels will just throw stuff on there while I don’t pay attention nor care to it, though it’s all fine with me.

This track ‘Trance Lego Highway’ is a 25-year-old song that was originally released on a tape in 1997 and is being rereleased on an upcoming album called ‘Synths Below Sealevel’ that will come out on 5 May. This is a compilation of early hard-to-find and never-before-released songs from me, some of them when I was dabbling along and started experimenting with synths in the mid-1990s in my adolescent bedroom studio. So really the first stuff I made, or maybe my ‘second wave’ and ‘third waves’ of music making; the tagline is ‘more outsider polder techno from the Legowelt archives from 1994 to 2004’. I don’t know why that specific track is on Spotify now. I guess the label did that as a sort of teaser, like I said it’s all cool with me as long as I don’t have to deal with Spotify myself life is too short for that ha-ha. The last “real” or ‘non-spotify’ release came out last month on the Portuguese All Nice Records, an EP called ‘Netherworld Sonomosis’ which I was quite happy about.

On that note, do you prefer 808s or 909s?
The 808. It is a more coherent drum machine – somehow it’s more fluid. But that might also be because I don’t have 909 haha. What I like about the 909 is when the hi-hats get crunchy and lo-fi..but most of the time it’s not a real 909 being used then. Like in the tracks of the 90s Sheffield group LFO: there is this incredible crunchy 909 hi-hat pattern and when I was a kid I was obsessed with the 909 sound in that track, but later I found out they made it so crunchy because they sampled the whole 909 hi-hat sequence in some 12-bit sampler. I always prefer to play 909 sounds from samplers, like from my old Commodore Amiga computer, the sounds become so compressed, gritty, staccato, funked, and intense. You can hear it in my track ‘Wir Lebten in Miniland’ . Those are 8-bit samples of the 909 being played with an Amiga computer going through a Yamaha GSP100 overdrive guitar amp effect.

But I like to look beyond the 808, 909, 707, etc. What I really like to do is make up ‘fantasy drum machines,’ which are free to use on my website. I will design new drum sounds with synthesizers and effects processors and create sample packs of drum machines that never existed like the Drumnibus Electro Rhythm or Pluton superdrums. 

You’re set to perform on Glamcult TV, are you excited? What do you have planned?
Well, excited might not be the right word, for an artist, this is of course something that they get excruciatingly anxious about, a recording that will stay on the internet forever haha. Nevertheless, I planned a sort of mixed DJ live set, I got my Ableton, a Roland SP404mk2, Novation Mininova & Basstation AFX, and will play unreleased new material with that I think mostly poppy electro songs maybe some digital dub stuff. Some live vocoder singing using the Mininova – might also turn into industrial noise, who knows.

To conclude, what does the near or not-so-near future hold for you?
I am looking forward to finishing several collaboration releases mostly on my own Nightwind Records label. I never did many collaborations but in the past year or so I started doing a lot of them and it’s really fun and good to learn from other people and be ‘out of the box’. I also started on a Macho Cat Garage record last week with Orgue Electronique, a producer, and friend, who I made a lot of records within the early 2000s, think smudgy disco-funk bass lines meet The Hague sewer electronics. 

Release-wise, first,  I am also finishing a new Noda & Wolfers album called “Avant Garde Rhythm Box”, this is a collaboration with the Japanese melodica player Takafumi Noda, a mix of raw lo-fi synth wave and digital Far Eastern style dub. We will be touring in August, like playing at the Dekmantel festival, something we are also excruciatingly anxious about ha-ha. Then also mixing down a collaboration album with my friend Andre Edwards-Roderique from Toronto, an amazing producer and mind blowing singer! Our group is called Phantom Energy and the album is called ‘People See The Mask’ – should be out in a few months I hope! And also not forgetting a really fun uplifting project with Shook, a keyboard virtuoso from The Hague, and a record with Lena Liza who is a great jazz singer also from The Hague – this will be like rainy film noir Bladerunner cyber jazz vocals with electro.

Thank you for your insights and vibrant energy! We are excitedly looking forward to your Glamcult TV set!