Legowelt: A Philosophy of Tracking

A Phi­los­o­phy of Track­ing was a vinyl LP album that accom­pa­nied the Legow­elt Poly­end Track­er hard­ware sequencer/​sampler released in 2021, that all tracks were made on. Legow­elt has now announced a dig­i­tal release, includ­ing a col­lec­tion of exclu­sive extra material.

For one of the addi­tion­al tracks, Com­put­er­land (For­get this Lousy World), Legow­elt made a video-clip using his own water­colour illus­tra­tions and animation. 

For the tech-heads:

The Poly­end Track­er is a Pol­ish elec­tron­ic music instru­ment, which is a hard­ware ver­sion of 1990s track­er music soft­ware like Pro­track­er and Octamed. Orig­i­nat­ing on the Com­modore Ami­ga and PC com­put­er, this soft­ware could exten­sive­ly sequence sound sam­ples. Respon­si­ble for begin­ning thou­sands of musi­cal careers, this soft­ware enabled those with just a basic com­put­er to make viable music in their bed­room with­out expen­sive music gear. It played a vital role in the devel­op­ment of many elec­tron­ic music styles such as Jun­gle, Gab­ber, Break­core and The Hague elec­tron­ix, to name a few.

In 2021 Poly­end released the TRACK­ER Legow­elt edi­tion: with a cus­tom face­plate designed by Legow­elt and 5000 sam­ples from his stu­dio. It also came with a bunch of tracks: “.mod files” that could be stud­ied and altered to your heart’s content. 

A Phi­los­o­phy of Track­ing there­fore is main­ly a selec­tion of these tracks with some vocoder/​vocals added. All songs were made on the track­er, with added vocals and vocoder from a ZOOM1201, Korg RK100S, Roland VT‑5 and some reverb and delay effects from an Ale­sis Midi­verb 4.