I reach my hand through layers of smoke generated by the faulty equipment nearby, glitching for the third time this week, and dial back the knobs to let up on the thrusters. Anything that keeps this floating trash bin from folding in on itself is the goal. I continue my search. There are too many stars to visit in such a short period, and with so little fuel; regardless, my thirst for discovering something beautiful is insatiable. The pulsing synthesizers and arpeggiated tones on Legowelt’s album opener, “Mi Vida en Deep Space 9,” encourages me to never give up on my voyage.
The heater is faulty, and my breaths generate a dense fog that coats the visors in thick mist. We’re fucked if I enter us into an asteroid field without seeing past the dashboard. I frantically wipe the windows with a cloth to clear my view as the propulsive and resonant filters quiver and squelch over a pounding beat that is “Plastic Wisdom or the Underground.” My sweat falls across the dashboard, causing me more work as I shake and swear under my breath. Will we ever find the answers?
I enjoyed listening to this fast-paced adventure of an album. The synthesizers and beat machines scattered throughout give it a real organic, almost rustic vibe, despite the instruments primarily sounding electronic.
What’s your perspective on using electronic instruments in your productions, and what is it about them that appeals to you as a musician?
Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with (electronic) music and synths. For me, they are magical devices that can create sounds that have never existed before… sounds from the imagination, from dreams, from realms that don’t exist in nature or would not make any sense in our reality.
I listened to all sorts of music growing up, but when I first discovered electronic music, I became completely enchanted by it. Hearing those strange electronic sounds and seeing the rave culture around them was so exciting. It felt different, new, fresh, rebellious, anarchistic. Like a new force that was going to change the world into some kind of peaceful cyberheaven. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way, but I really wanted to be part of that, so I delved into it with all my energy and time.
Also, being part of it was actually quite accessible. Electronic music has this ultimate DIY punk ethic: you didn’t need a fancy studio, and you didn’t need to be in a band with five people and all the conflicting egos that can come with that. You could make a record as a kid in your bedroom with a Commodore Amiga 1200 and a cassette deck.
At the time, synthesizers and drum machines like the Juno, TB-303, or TR machines could also still be found cheap secondhand. So there was this feeling that you could just get your hands on these machines and start creating your own world without really knowing what you were doing… and that didn’t matter either. The songs could be totally atonal and weird… that’s how so many great records came from that time, the late ’80s and early ’90s, because people just tried and didn’t know how the machines really worked and had no idea of music theory. It was completely free and anarchy.
It’s quite different now, with electronic music being completely mainstream and generic, but in the ’90s it still felt futuristic to me. It felt like a new and hopeful culture for humanity… and the synthesizers and drum machines were a way of participating in that future.
While I’m wiping the dashboard, I notice a blip on my radar screen. It’s moving faster than anything I’ve seen on our journey. The radar beeps rhythmically in alignment with the introduction on “Legends Ooze,” but this isn’t the time to dance.
Stumbling over to the screen, another warning flashes: this material is highly irradiated; remaining within any proximity would cause radiation poisoning. I sprint towards the exit to alert the crew, knocking several half-eaten packages of crackers off the desk. Without warning, the vessel enters zero gravity and I lose my footing—the small morsels of those crackers scatter around me; shutting my eyes and brushing the crumbs aside, I grab onto the handles to pull myself through.
The tracks are ever-changing; in fact, they sound like they were performed live. What’s your general approach to composition, and are there certain routines that you follow when producing that work best for you in your creative workflow?
Yes, you heard that very well…. the tracks are indeed ever-changing. For me, electronic music should be fluid, organic, and raw.
A song can be incredibly simple. It can be just one synthesizer riff or bassline with one drum pattern. If you play it completely dry and static, it can sound sterile and boring. But then you put a delay over the master (some studio people would probably say, “YOU CAN’T DO THAT!”) and start tweaking the delay time, feedback, and EQ on the mixer while the track is playing. Suddenly, it becomes alive.
A good example for me is some of the early Mr. Fingers / Larry Heard productions, like the “Mysteries of Love” Dub Mix. I can’t stress enough how important delay and echo are to me. They make the music multidimensional… they lift it off into space.
I learned a lot of this from dub music. Dub is really one of the foundational blueprints for electronic music, rave, techno, and many of the things that came later. It’s something you should study and understand… especially the way it creates space and makes you perceive music on a multidimensional plane.
For me, delay or echo is not just an effect. It’s an instrument that you can play. Continuously changing the parameters, throwing it in and out of the mix, pushing the feedback, tweaking the delay… these things can create a certain kind of magic.
And it’s not only the effects. I’m constantly changing the synthesizer sounds too… altering envelopes, filters, modulation, levels, and so on. The idea is that the music should never feel completely frozen. Even when the basic ingredients are very simple, there should always be something moving, morphing… even if it’s very discrete… That’s what makes it feel alive.
I fumble for the intercom and yell for the crew. Where are they? It’s zero gravity, yet I hear no surprised sounds from the cabins surrounding the navigation bay. I wish the crew would wake up. I could use their support.
The drums continue driving forward on “Sequential Circus Prophet 600,” and over the vocoder whispers, repeating the song’s title, I can overhear the ship’s AI communicate its diagnosis of the ship’s engines. I can’t quite make out the update, but it’s clear that the ship is gasping its last breath. There is only so much that I can do on my own to hold things together. The ship’s zero-gravity capabilities are glitching; frequently and unpredictably, they turn on and off, causing me to fall into objects while I’m navigating around the cabin. The interjections of unexpected gravitational forces ebb and flow like the woozy beats on “Valley of the Sirimiri.” The hard-hitting beats pair nicely with my collisions against the ship’s internals.
What has ZORLOK COMPRESSOR allowed you to do that your other moniker, Legowelt, has not?
Ha, to play old-school breakcore jungle breaks… seriously. Let me tell you how I think the Zorlok Compressor project sort of evolved. For a few years, I had this project with the Japanese dub producer Takafumi Noda, aka Mystica Tribe, called Noda & Wolfers. We did a few records like Evil Fades in Echo. Noda has an encyclopedic knowledge of music, especially dub stuff. He knows every rhythm and how it is played, etc. I learned so much from making music with him, and also because it’s dub music, my rhythms became different. I understood more that tempo can be more fluid and how bass and rhythm and melody and chords interact in the purest form. So this dub music started to influence the Legowelt electro/Italo/house/techno sound more and more.
And also in my live shows, I usually start with some Italo-ish electro with live vocoder, then go to techno, a raw house thing in between, and in the later part, it’s just pure mayhem, dancefloor energy. I would sometimes throw in jungle breaks and Spiral Tribe hypno-acid-style stuff, but then I just throw in halftime, heavy digital dub stuff with acid and parallel delay FX, and the crowd goes mental with that. It is sort of giving more musical freedom…
Zorlok Compressor is a soup of Italo electro, Acidhall, digital dub, old-school jungle, rave, tekno, hypno trance, and everything in between—all my musical knowledge I have attained in the past 30 years or so, all my influences combined into one lethal dancefloor force, haha.
I’m missing the tools to fix the heater, the zero-gravity capacitor, and the object continues approaching: I’m a lost cause. I must find and wake the crew. I scramble into the cabins below and search for a light, flicking the switch to see… Nothing. They’re all gone. Not missing, but their sleeping pods are empty. The mess room, the cafeteria; nobody is here. The air is icy, and the fog in front of my face begins to shake as I cannot stop my head from trembling. The ship’s iron bars and zero-gravity body slams hurt, but the recognition that you are truly alone in any space is more painful than my mind can bear.
I slowly back out of the room. How did I get here? The incessant beeping has stopped—it’s now just a continuous tone, held as the object on its collision course is well beyond the range of evasive maneuvers. I should be dead already. But why hasn’t the object torn through the hull of the ship?
I jump after hearing a sudden bump in the docking bay. I sprint towards the bay to see who, or what, is waiting at the station.
Strange figures are waiting; their faces are covered by a strange, organic film, but their suits are sturdy and resemble a reptilian, fleshy material. They motion towards each other as I approach and I raise my arms in surrender. Anything’s better than this loneliness. They motion to each other again and force me into a similar suit, offering me a shoulder to lean on as we stagger together into their ship. As the ship takes off, the echoes of “Olympic Raver” ring out into the vast emptiness of space, filling the void with the promise of more adventures to come.
What instruments do you feel the most inspired to play and why? Additionally, when can we expect more volumes from the ZORLOK COMPRESSOR moniker?
First of all, yes, more ZORLOK COMPRESSOR music will see the daylight. This is a serious project that will most probably continue forever. LEGOWELT = ZORLOK COMPRESSOR, as it says on the flyers, ha. What instruments do I feel inspired to play!? There are the usual suspects, workhorses for the raw energy, bass, and synth sounds: the MS-20, MiniMoog, Prophet 600/Pro One. For the melodies, the Oberheim Matrix, old crunchy samplers that give bitcrushed sketches of reality, computers both obsolete and new… the Commodore AMIGA remains the greatest musical DIY instrument ever.