"The tracks on Synths Below Sea Level were unearthed from your tape archives. For people who aren’t familiar with working with tape, what was it like to record a song? Did you record parts and layer them, or record everything live in one take?"

Legowelt: I know cassette tape is all cool now and I love it as a format, both for its sound and the technology materialized hauntological memory that it occupies in our mind/history/culture etc.

But when I started out in the 1990s this was used out of pure necessity, there was nothing else to record on…there was no way to record on a computer or digital system, DAT those things were way too expensive. Back then all that old stuff that is expensive now, analog synths and drummachines, analog tape was used because it was cheap. I didn’t have the means to buy something more ‘professional’. The tape recorder I used for a lot of my early tracks was actually something we found on the street. My dad worked as a night porter at a hospital, and to earn a bit of extra cash, he’d go out on the days when people put out their bulky waste, things like old furniture, lamps, records, books and sometimes hi-fi gear or even old computers and resell whatever he could find. I would tag along sometimes and when we hit the wealthier neighborhoods where a lot of embassy staff lived it would be a real treasure trove. You would be amazed at the condition of some of the stuff they got rid of, sometimes brand new. They probably had to relocate to another country, so they just left it behind at the trash. To this day I always scan bulky trash heaps from the corner of my eye who knows there might be a Minimoog in there!

That’s how I got my first cassette recorders, there was an AKAI and a Sony. We also found a bunch of Hifi Amp and Phillips speakers that I used for years as my main studio speakers.…Unbeknownst those were super good to mix stuff on, just hifi speakers but the Yamaha NS10’s were that too and a few of those Phillips ones are sought after these days. For the cassette tapes I would use my mum’s old Arabic language lesson tapes, she was studying that and she had boxes full of those that I can use. Sometimes you would still hear the Arabic lesson seeping into the music if you listen really carefully ha.

 Anyways…. That stuff would be the foundation of my early recordings.

To answer your question how a song would be recorded; all instruments would be fed into the mixer (that would be an Inkel MX995 in the very beginning) That mixer was connected to a hifi amp that fed the speakers and also would have a line out to the cassette recorder. Everything had to be recorded in one take perfectly, MIDI would be sequenced by either an Amiga or Atari computer and all the tweaks would have to be recorded live. I didn’t have any multi tracking capabilities in my studio. So you would practice a few times and then record it, doing live volume mixing on the mixer etc.

"The song 'Dance The Hypno Wave' from Synths Below Sealevel stands out as a particularly unique track. Do you recall approximately when it was made and where the vocal samples came from?"

Legowelt: Sometimes you can’t really remember how or when something was made, it was just one of those magic perfect timings where everything aligns in the recording and you go ‘oh wow I made that’ the next day…sometimes you find a song like that on an old tape or in the depths of a hard disk years later.

"Many know you for using vintage synthesizers and hardware, but do you use any older music software outside of Octamed? There’s still an active community of people using ReBirth RB-338 in 2025."

"Do you recall how you achieved the glitchy hi-hat sound at the beginning of 'Wanda’s Car'?"

Legowelt: That is a synthetic voice sample saying ‘electro’ mangled a bit in the Roland MKS100 sampler. Some more about that track… I was very much obsessed with Model 500’s use of the Sequential Pro One synthesizer in the early/mid90s…like he tweaks the filter and envelopes live throughout the song, really using that as a part of the instrument's signature sound… creating these almost off world harmonics, especially when the resonance goes a bit out of control. You can hear it really good in his songs like Techno City 1995 and I See the Light. Around that time I obtained a Pro one for very cheap (I think I traded it for an AKAI VX90 I got for 150 guilders somewhere with a Spanish Flamenco musician who wanted a polyphonic racksynth) and realised straight away that this was this unique sound Model 500 usd on those tracks I was obsessed with. So this was sort of an attempt / study to create something similar. Of course I didn’t really know what I was doing and something different was the result…I must have used the internal sequencer of the Pro One synced to the TR808??? There was also a Yamaha REX-50, a very good multi effects box that was my only effects processor in that time.

Wanda was the girlfriend and later wife of Orgue Electronique, and she had a car which she would drive us to gigs because we didn’t have a driving license until much much later. It was a white Ford Sierra. Wanda passed away last year unfortunately. 

Discord user buttonwillow asked: "Is there anyone you would like to collaborate with or experiment in another genre or subgenre with? Kinda like the Noda + Wolfers collab."

Legowelt: I have recorded an album with Andre Edwards-Roderique (also known as R, Ricardo Lain and part of Èbony with Jordan Gardner) an incredible singer and producer from Toronto. We wanted to get an amalgam of soul and electro/wavish stuff…like cold synthetic electro with warm vocals. We used a lot of old analog rhythm boxes and rhythms from old homekeyboards and raw synths. More news about this later this year! 

Discord user bigclassicpie asked: “What is your thought process behind why some releases get the Legowelt name and others get released under a pseudonym?"

Legowelt: This question is asked a lot and there are always many factors. The most obvious one is that the style is different. The stuff under Legowelt is a continuation of my vision of electro, techno, italo, disco, house music, minimal wave, EBM and whatever more…. which in my mind is all the same music…all the stuff I have been influenced by that really touched me from the beginning…Detroit, Rephlex, 154, Basic Channel, Absolute Body Control etc.

I really hate style boundaries and sort of detest what most techno music has become a bland ultra boring melodyless porridge in which everything sounds the same.…the worst is a DJ playing the same boring bland ‘groovy’ techno for hours…where every track sounds the same like its just AI music, no adventure, no fun just pure boredom and mindnumbing ennui… I play a lot of gigs and sometimes I see some of these DJs how to they behave…thinking they are so cool , so full of themselves…all drugged up and very little or really…no artistic talent, and lot of time no sense of the music history or whatever…they don’t have the guts to play something weird or different just the same style anyways you can read my Wombald & Slorpy comics those are like my reports of what goes on in that world…what was the question again!??!

Discord user colin_2013 asked: "What is your favorite point and click adventure game?" and also "What is your favorite video game music?"

Legowelt: Ha I really like(d) point and click adventures when I was a kid, maybe not so even playing them I could never figure out the puzzles etc. but the idea that you could walk around in a made up world and discover stuff and interact with proto NPC’s. A sort of interactive play/movie that was in theory pretty simple to make, of course I tried to make one myself on the Commodore Amiga computer but that was a bit of too big a project for a kid. I think in some ways a lot of scenes in my Ambient Trip Commander animation are influenced by how point and click adventures present their world…how the character moves about towards locations etc.

Favorite video game music…maybe New York Warriors main theme on the Commodore Amiga

And the Paranoimia cracktro theme by Felix Schmidt.

"As of late, do you have any favorite songs of your own or creations you are especially proud of?"

"What records and artists have you been listening to on your own time?"

Legowelt: Mainly Dub Reggae from the golden digital age and late medieval organ music, synthwave stuff,

Electro…all kinds of stuff. In my car I just listen to the 80s pop station.

Legowelt: Ha yeah Polder techno is this distinct dutch very dreamy emotional style of techno from the 1990s, basically Dutch kids fascinated or better said obsessed with Detroit techno…and maybe some British and German stuff too. Inspired by this music they tried for themselves and somehow this created a distinct Dutch style . Like the Dutch light, the skies, the reflection, the shadows, the society it gave the music a specific atmosphere and style. The Netherlands somehow was very open to the sounds of Detroit. There was an easy access to synthesizers, computers, there was a lot of freedom and some excitement about a brighter future, which of course didn't really occur. It was however the last vision of a future in a futuristic sense before any future collapsed, eh in a Mark Fisherian way.

Some Dutch Polder techno classics:

Steve Rachmad / Sterac stuff from the early 90s

Stefan Robbers Terrace’s Round Up album and his Florence stuff on Eevo Lute muzique

Any Newworldaquarium stuff especially the 154 Strike album is the zenith of this style

Orlando Voorn’s The Living Room Room service album, 

Wladimir M (For example Evil)

Connection Machine (For example Poly 8000)

Maybe some Psychick Warriors of Gaia/ Exquisite Corpse stuff 

If you push it further Dimitri / Eric Nouhan stuff like their Time Problem track