catalog

Well-known member
I'm still listening to Craners 100-200 and enjoying it, and now wash your hands' list has come along. But I'll get to legowelt in time
 

RWY

Well-known member
Legowelt is by far my favourite contemporary producer - I own more records by him than by any other artist but it wasn't until I started travelling around Europe (normally via Rotterdam and Amsterdam) by train a few years ago, with my phone loaded up with his albums, that I began to fully appreciated the genius of his work. In my head he's the Netherlands' equivalent of what Burial is to London.
 

RWY

Well-known member
I recommend listening to his albums over the course of a long-distance train journey in Europe (Brussels - Amsterdam and Amsterdam - Berlin are the go-to routes) for full effect.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Legowelt is by far my favourite contemporary producer - I own records by him than by any other artist but it wasn't until I started travelling around Europe (normally via Rotterdam and Amsterdam) by train a few years ago, with my phone loaded up with his albums, that I began to fully appreciated the genius of his work. In my head he's the Netherlands' equivalent of what Burial is to London.

Have you heard astro unicorn radio?
 

RWY

Well-known member
You able to expand on this a bit?

The Netherlands is concurrently a very different place (at least spatially) from Britain, yet it feels far more familiar culturally than, say, France or Germany. It successfully implemented modernism as a method of social organisation in the form of architecture and urban planning in a way that we, by all accounts, failed miserably at. Burial's music is normally talked about as an artistic reflection of the lived experience of the failure of this project i.e. the tragic experiences that we've touched upon in the Grim Britannia thread that state-sanctioned modernist architecture gave rise to and which Mark Fisher/Owen Hatherley dedicated their careers to examining. The Netherlands, on the other hand, appears to be a country where this project was implented on a far greater scale (due predominantly to the wider extent of physical destruction the country was subjucated to during WWII) and where it seems to have worked - I'm not aware of the total social breakdown and visual dilapidation in the Netherlands of the kind the UK experienced from the late 1970s - mid 2000s. Maybe some academic marxist/economist types will have explanations for why this was but for me, from my own experiences and from what I've read at least, the Netherlands seems to have got it right where we got it so very, very wrong. On the other hand, the success of the Netherlands model lends to itself it's own air of sterile melancholy, and it is this feeling which I believe Legowelt's music best articulates.
 
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RWY

Well-known member
If that makes absolutely no sense to anyone, I suggest booking an interrail ticket and spending a week travelling around the Netherlands rail system and walking around places like Almere whilst listening to Legowelt on repeat.
 

version

Well-known member
The Netherlands is concurrently a very different place (at least spatially) from Britain, yet it feels far more familiar culturally than, say, France or Germany. It successfully implemented modernism as a method of social organisation in the form of architecture and urban planning in a way that we, by all accounts, failed miserably at. Burial's music is normally talked about as an artistic reflection of the lived experience of the failure of this project i.e. the tragic experiences that we've touched upon in the Grim Britannia thread that state-sanctioned modernist architecture gave rise to and which Mark Fisher/Owen Hatherley dedicated their careers to examining. The Netherlands, on the other hand, appears to be a country where this project was implented on a far greater scale (due predominantly to the wider extent of physical destruction the country was subjucated to during WWII) and where it seems to have worked - I'm not aware of the total social breakdown and visual dilapidation in the Netherlands of the kind the UK experienced from the late 1970s - mid 2000s. Maybe some academic marxist/economist types will have explanations for why this was but for me, from my own experiences and from what I've read at least, the Netherlands seems to have got it right where we got it so very, very wrong. On the other hand, this success of the Netherlands model lends to itself it's own air of sterile melancholy, and it is this feeling which I believe Legowelt's music best articulates.
I'd be interested to hear what @yyaldrin thinks of this.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Pretty sure he does. Recent photos of him at home with his synths look to be in the same place as the youtube's Leo posted from years ago, not to mention all the other times he's been filmed there
 
L

linee

Guest
to me, the thing that's interesting about him - compared to a similar kind of multi-mode homage artist like Ed DMX - is all the "world building"around it. but rather than it just being there for the listeners - it's more that he's builds these worlds for himself and then kind of plays dress-ups in them and that's part of the whole thing... kind of a boyish thing of making up little scenarios and arbitrary rules to the games. all the backstory write-ups, all the specific pseudonyms, strange life and nightwind records, the watercolour drawings, the website, the synth write-ups and the cyber zine etc.

it's all obviously kind of tongue-in-cheek but that's essentially what he's exclusively done for over 20 years so there's a bit more to it than that maybe? like he wouldn't be able to make music without that element.

so if Ed DMX's music is the sum of his various interests filtered through his particular taste, Legowelt seems bit more interesting to because it's that plus the addition of all this fantasy aesthetic/contextual stuff around it which kind of feels like the work to me. the music is just part of the expression of it. so in a way he's kind of more playful version of that way a lot of music is presented now - as an expression of some approach or experiment. an art world approach that needs a context and a little placard in the corner.

in saying that, it's telling that i probably only like about 10% of what i've heard of his...
 
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