Hungry Like The Wolfers

Danny Wolfers has forged a twenty-year career under the steam of his most notable pseudonym Legowelt. But in amongst his plethora of side projects are some real gems that bare closer attention, Spice Route goes for a digital forage…….

2011, I’m outside of the now-defunct Bristol nightclub Timbuk2; I’m drunk and attempting to engage a moderately taciturn yet superficially amiable Dutchman in conversation by trying to elicit his recommendations for mid-priced digital drum machines. The Dutchman in question is Danny Wolfers and he had just performed a bruising live set as Legowelt and was attempting, unsuccessfully, to decompress in silence outside the club. After temperately chain-smoking three Marlboro Red and patiently dealing with my tedious questions, Wolfers parried a question my way.

DW: “Tell me is Postman Pat still playing on UK television?”

Me: “Yes Danny, he now has a wife and children”

DW: “Great in which case I’m going to back to my hotel to find that on the internet”

And with that Wolfers vanished into the night. This encounter did not quite conform to the maxim that you should never meet your heroes for fear of disappointment; in-fact the contrary. The meeting with Wolfers presented him just as I had expected him to be, a man swimming against the fickle tides of fashion. To Wolfers, an interest in British animated postal workers appeared to carry as equal weight as an interest in drum machines. Whats more Wolfers enjoyed it without a hint of pretence — he didn’t need to stick around to bathe in the irony of the prospect a 30-year-old man watching Postman Pat at 4 am in a Holiday Inn — he just needed to get back and find the new episodes.

“There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.” And one says, “ This is new, and therefore better.”

― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

It’s unsurprising that Wolfers has such a bullshit-free outlook on culture. His musical education was delivered in the febrile atmosphere of the Hague squat party scene by such mercurial figures as I-F and Guy Tavares aka Unit Moebius, both of whom instilled an uncompromising and hipster averse mentality in Wolfers. For Wolfers, there is nothing to be gained in choosing one side of a binary. Hardware vs software is just technological dogma, the practice of fetishising old over new is shortsighted as both are valid, high and low culture are indivisible; instead for Wolfers, music and indeed culture as a whole is best enjoyed on your own terms and for him, that is at it’s weird and freaky fringes.

I don’t have any interest in trendy people, if they think the music’s hip well that’s ok as I make some money from that but then if I play a dark set live I get to annoy those same people (Danny Wolfers speaking in the 2004 MTV documentary— This Is Our Music)

Wolfers’ eclectic cultural tastes were astutely surveyed back in 2015 by The Wire’s Emily Bick. Within the article Bick spends some time profiling the curious “cyberpunk” universe of Wolfers, exploring his music and non-musical pursuits which include programming his own computer games on antiquated amiga PCs, compiling a text-based cyberzine called OrDeR Of ThE ShAdOw Wolf, “that looks like something that would have circulated on an email listserve in 1996” and watching old 70 and 80s sci-fi b-movies. Bick ends the article with the on-point summation of Wolfers working methods in music as “akin to the methods of old school hacking, where you take what’s around, work with what you can afford that suits your needs to get it done and use scraps to solve problems.”

This cyberpunk mentality has resulted in Wolfers having a dizzying panoply of pseudonyms. Faithful to the punk part of the cyberpunk ethic Wolfers is outwardly opposed to any grandiose or progressive overtones in his work. In a recent interview with the Psychedelic Baby Magazine, Wolfers describes his methodology, “I just hate the word ‘concept’ or ‘conceptual’, you get into academic art grant territory very quickly with these terms. I would rather talk about musical narratives, stories. I used to make a record every week back in the 2000s and just would make up an artist name and a sort of loose story behind it; it was like doing comic books or something, a bit like pulp comics/magazines.”

The record-a-week statement above is not hyperbole either. To date, Wolfers must be one of the most prolific electronic producers ever. By my count beyond the guise of Legowelt, Wolfers has recorded and released music under nearly 40 different pseudonyms. What’s laudable amongst these releases is how Wolfer’s hacker mindset has allowed him to make a range of music with almost as much diversity as his seemingly endless list of project titles. Ambient music in many shades, house, techno, electro, space jazz, disco, afrobeat, ghettofunk, horror soundtracks, synthwave, black metal, and dancehall have all been created in the Scheveningen based home studio of Wolfers.

Where other producers may see barriers to creating such a wide range of music for fear of not being able to create a faithful sound, Wolfers is unencumbered by such dogma. Instead, Wolfers chooses to create music on his terms driven by an idea and not cleaved to a purist mindset that dictates music can only be made on certain instruments by certain people.

It’s perhaps a fool's errand to try and corral Wolfers back catalog and give it some sort of unity, instead I’ve simply selected seven of my favourites from his non-Legowelt side projects. All are testament to the vivid energy of Wolfers' imagination, the precision of his synth wizardry, and the tenacity of his creative powers.

Klaus Weltman — Search Yourself (2004)

It’s relatively easy to discern the German influences that Wolfers is trying to pay homage to within this track taken from the 2004 album ‘Cultus Island’. The glorious interlocking sequencer patterns of ‘Search Yourself’ are perhaps the most redolent of the “Klaus” Berlin school works that Wolfers hacks and reboots using only a Korg Mono/Poly synth.

Raheem Hershel — Do Da Dudley

Raheem Hershel is Wolfers engaging in a full-on Chicago homage. In particular, Do Da Dudley with its urgent siren-like synth line over kinetic Roland drums draws to mind the Steve Poindexter remix of Eric Martin’s Emergency. Naysayers call it pastiche but I call it bloody great.

Twilight Moose — Forest Information Center

A remarkable feature of Wolfers’ music is the ability of each track to perfectly evoke its title. Listening to the glacial Drexciyan tones and icy 808s one can clearly picture a snow-covered log cabin out in the wilds of the Alaskan woods, home to a solitary park ranger manning the desolate forest information center in Wolfer’s richly detailed sonic universe.

Venom 18 — Mystery Organization

Sometimes Discogs comments can perfectly encapsulate the essence of a track. And with the simple wisdom of toomzz in your mind, you can see yourself oiled up and slap bang in the python pit cutting some rug to this muscular arpeggiated churner.

Sammy Osmo — Verlaten Dierentuin Wassenaar

Let us consider the plot of this imagined spy noir film to which Wolfers supplies the soundtrack, which was recently reissued on Alex Egan’s Utter. It tells the story of Percival, a NATO animal parapsychologist researching the extra-sensory powers of a Siamese cat and a chess-playing chimpanzee named Albert. Set against this Python-esque narrative Wolfers paints a vivid and emotive tapestry, heavily reliant on the rich FM tones of the DX7. One could not find a more apposite depiction of Wolfers’ crazed inner world than this.

Satomi Taniyama — Macau Connection

What’s often most impressive is how deep into character Wolfers descends when creating music under a pseudonym. The authentic Japanese styling on the album sleeve, complete with a sleeve note that claims recording took place in Japan, creates a suitable smokescreen for Wolfers to work behind. Ostensibly a homage to the glorious electronic synth fusion releases that have found currency in the last few years thanks to Music From Memory et al the music still ripples with the idiosyncratic Wolfers flourish. Macau Connection is a personal highlight, a marriage of glorious digital flutes breathing over a luminescent lead line as a counterpoint that fades out to leave only a plaintive ersatz organ.

Nacho Patrol — Twinotter

Wolfers does afrobeat albeit without the customary 8 piece band. I could have picked any track from this release but my absolute percy is this Twinotters. Again, sometimes a Discogs commenter can provide all the description you need, this time from some nobhead calling himself Spice Route ;)

It’s very much an impossible task to try and impose any kind of order to the work of Wolfers. The cyberpunk mentality of the artist appears to create works that resist any sort of neat categorisation or fit in with the linear arc of a press-friendly artist ‘journey’. So all I can do is encourage the uninitiated to set aside an afternoon and dive into Bandcamp/Discogs/Youtube to saturate yourself with his music and select your own favourites. These are just seven of my current favourites, in a months time there may be seven more of these strange synthetic stories from Scheveningen that have captivated for over a decade and will continue to do so for many more.