HCBXCast 65 - Interview With Low Entropy
Low Entropy has long been a unique voice in the Hardcore underground. From Doomcore and Speedcore to experimental offshoots like Slowcore, his catalogue stretches across decades and countless labels, always pushing against boundaries.
For HCBXCast 65 he delivers a different kind of live set – raw, unpolished, and true to his approach. In this conversation we talk about his history of raving and performing, his creative process, the huge range of music he puts out, and his perspective on Hamburg’s changing underground scene.
This one goes in-depth, and gives a real glimpse into the mind of one of Hardcore’s most distinctive artists.
HCBX: How the hell are you? Good to get you back on HCBXCast! What has been great about your submissions has been the varying themes of your sets. Tell us about this one?
LE: The idea behind this set is related to a story by a guy who, just like me, did a show at a local DIY “anarchist” radio station here in Hamburg (kinda like a semi-legalized pirate radio). He told me one of the venues he was involved in booked an industrial band to come to Germany and do a gig (forgot the name, but I think they were from Scandinavia).
But instead of a band, a parcel arrived at the venue, containing a pre-recorded cassette and a handwritten note explaining: “this is our live performance.”
My mate said he thinks they were right about this: “Why shouldn’t a cassette tape be a live performance?”
My idea builds on this. The submission is my live performance. I’m doing music for around an hour, and an audience listens to it. The only difference is that the listeners are spread all over the world instead of being together in one venue. Why should an artist, DJ, band, or listeners be required to be physically present for a gig?
HCBX: So a Low Entropy “Live Set”! What’s your history in playing at raves and parties? Do you have any stories to tell either playing a gig or raving?
LE: Yeah, I played at a lot of parties, especially “back in the day”. For example, at Tresor in Berlin – together with Simon Underground and a few other maniacs – or right here in Hamburg at Nordcore. Particularly nice was my first gig in the Netherlands, in The Hague with FFF and some other DJs.
Most of the time, traveling, gigs, or even venues were not as well-organized as they are now (maybe). So here are some assorted memory nuggets:
Standing literally in the fields, at midnight, in the middle of nowhere, in Lower Saxony, with a group of other crazed ravers. Looking around and for miles, only darkness was visible, other fields, and forests. “Now where is the venue again? Did we take a wrong turn? Could someone get the map again?” (before the days of GPS and smartphones – if you were lost, you were lost).
Driving to a gig in Bakalla’s SUV. And, when we got there, the promoters were nowhere to be seen! We looked at each other in amazement, but Bakalla said “We can do this!” So we went directly to the owners of the venue, did the soundcheck and setup ourselves, and played the first sets. I think the promoters eventually arrived – sometime around 2am.
Being lost in the sticks (again), asking a passerby how to get to the central station of Hannover to take the train home to Hamburg. He just pointed in one direction and told us to go there. We asked “That’s it, no other instructions?” “No.” So we went off and walked in a straight line, for 2 hours and several kilometres, without taking any turn left or right – and actually arrived at the gates of the central station.
HCBX: You have your fingers in a vast number of musical pies working with lots of different styles of hard electronic music. How did you first get into Hardcore Techno and all the other stuff? Was there a particular track or artist that sealed the deal?
LE: Well, I was 13 years old, the techno/trance wave was sweeping Germany, everyone was talking about Hardcore too. But the radio/TV stations more or less boycotted that sound, and I felt “too young” to go to the clubs, so these sounds were not as easily accessible as they are now. There was no YouTube, SoundCloud, anything.
One night I switched on MTV’s Party Zone. Turned out they aired a Digital Hardcore special. For one hour I was seeing clips by Ec8or, Atari Teenage Riot – bands and sounds I had never seen or heard before. From this moment on, I was lost to Hardcore. I knew this was where I wanted to be, what I wanted to do.
HCBX: Who are your main influences in the Hardcore scene, both back in the day and now?
LE: Back in the day, mainly “the big three”, as I liked to call them: Fischkopf, Praxis, and DHR. All three stood for a more experimental, adventurous, and eclectic approach to Hardcore and Techno.
It’s funny, nowadays most people would not even connect these three labels with each other anymore, but they shared part of their artist roster and networked together.
I have a special connection to Fischkopf, maybe because it’s based in Hamburg too, and I feel attached to its cold and dark seaport vibes.
And then there’s PCP, a label that has become my overarching desire.
As for today’s influences: I of course love the early Hardcore/Terror revival scene and its artists. Then there are projects that combine HC/Gabber sounds with other extreme genres like punk, rap, and EBM in a very good way (and I don’t mean just sampling).
Plus, there are so many thrilling and inspiring genres around… synthwave, indie pop, witchhouse, black metal…
HCBX: As well as 3 million digital releases on nearly every hard label going, you’ve had vinyl releases on Widerstand, Blut, and Black Monolith to name a few. How do you keep the tracks coming? Which of your releases are you most proud of and why?
LE: The tracks keep coming by themselves – it would be harder for me to stop producing than to just keep going.
Here are some releases that I think might be interesting:
Stirner Trax – I highlighted parts in Stirner’s book (there is only one) which I think express some of the most important and deepest philosophical insights. I recorded myself reading them, then gave them the Slowcore treatment. I also distorted the recordings of the text so that they became incomprehensible. So the meaning got lost, but I think this is exactly the meaning of Stirner’s book too!
All The Beautiful Ones Dance in the Shadows – The story sounds strange, but it’s true: I woke up at 3am one night ’cause the full moon was beaming through my window like a fireball. I thought: “I know exactly what to do”, got out of bed, fired up the computer, started a production session from scratch, and 30 minutes later I had a finished 60-minute album ready!
Love Destroys All Hierarchies – From inception to finish, this project took me 27 years! And it’s the longest Hardcore track ever, running for over 1 hour. It switches between various styles – Doomcore, Hardcore, Speedcore – but is one coherent track. I tried to embed the meaning of love within this hour, but I am not sure anyone has found it yet. Also, I won’t tell you the minute mark.
HCBX: How do you approach the many different styles you produce? Do you wake up and say, “today I’m going to make Slowcore”?
LE: Yes.
HCBX: Straight to the point! What is your studio setup like for producing and for your mixes, and how has this changed over the years?
LE: I actually tried to keep my setup secret, as I thought it would damage my reputation, but I guess my reputation is bad enough anyway (?), so I can let the cat out of the bag as well:
I do everything on lowest budget equipment. I still have a half-damaged stereo from the 90s, I buy €20 headphones at the chain store till they break down and I buy new ones.
I started on Impulse Tracker for MS-DOS in 1996 (my 12"s on Blut, Praxis, and Widerstand were produced that way). Then I switched to Jeskola Buzz Tracker, and almost all my tracks were produced using that program.
Other people told me they never got Buzz to work properly, and indeed it is prone to crashes, but it works for me for some reason.
You know, some people take in dogs that are already missing a limb, an ear, and half their tail... That’s what Buzz is for me. A damaged and discarded app from the history of music production, that grew fond to my heart over the years; and strangely enough, it gives me back amazing music in return (I hope!).
HCBX: Production-wise: what’s your workflow like? While you produce in a number of styles, your sound is unmistakably Low Entropy – how do you create your sound?
LE: Yes. It’s me. It’s the concept of “low entropy” in physics – the second law of thermodynamics. The sound is a representation of that (I hope!).
HCBX: Writing seems to be a big thing for you – you are quite the documentarian of the Hardcore scene with your blogs, essays, and contributions on the likes of Discogs and Reddit. The Hardcore Overdogs is an encyclopaedia for the scene. What attracts you to writing and how do you keep so prolific?
LE: It’s an interesting story, and I don’t think I have told it yet. Back in 2001 I stayed a week in Berlin in order to deliver the CD-R master for my 12" on Praxis to Christoph Fringeli.
While we were hanging out at some café in East Berlin, he mentioned that the situation is dire for underground electronics, as all the major magazines and news outlets were boycotting this scene. And the internet was not really helpful in that regard, either. He suggested that someone should set up a paper fanzine for this sound. He asked me whether this would not be exactly the right thing for me, and when I said yes, he assigned me to that task.
So I got together with a few friends and acquaintances, and we started the Auralsex magazine. I interviewed Dr Macabre for that zine and wrote record reviews etc. It was a xerox magazine, like the old punk fanzines. We had “acolytes” in different German cities to whom we sent a copy, and they then xeroxed 100s more. And we handed them out at parties, squat raves, or sent them by mail to the readers.
It could be that a single issue of our magazine had 10,000 readers or more this way. Which, in retrospect, was quite a large amount for a Hardcore Techno mag on cheap paper that came from the xerox machine.
It was very short-lived though – only 5 or 6 issues. So that was the proper start of my “writing habit” as regards Hardcore Techno.
HCBX: Collaborations, podcasts, sample packs, projects like DJ AI, video production etc. Is there no end to your output? How do you find the time to fit everything in, and what do you like working on most?
LE: No, there is no end to it. I sometimes fear that I have some obsessive-compulsive disorder, like those poor people who need to wash their hands 10 times every 5 minutes. Only that my obsession is to work on art projects.
My “time secret” is that I always have a pen, phone, laptop, or brain with me, and work on my projects while being on the bus, train, having lunch, doing sports, watching TV, or any other “leisure/free time” activity.
HCBX: About Hamburg: you’ve been integral to the city’s Hardcore narrative—what’s Hamburg’s current role in underground electronic music, from your perspective? And how has it changed since you started off?
LE: Hamburg used to be an innovator and had very strong music scenes/subculture. Hamburg was the “hardcore punk capital” for Germany in the 80s, bands like Einstürzende Neubauten were connected to the city, Hamburg was a leading force in Speedcore, and its early Breakcore output was only eclipsed by Berlin.
But at the turn of the millennium, the big gentrification happened, like in many cities around the world. Clubs only played tech house and chic minimal, for people in designer clothes who don’t want to get sweaty. Even the infamous red-light district (St. Pauli!) is now a safe & boring tourist hub.
Here is a story that might show the situation in Hamburg right now: last November I was visiting a Christmas market, and once I got there, I noticed that the most pricey drink did cost €200. And on the way there I passed by an innocently-looking store, yet when I looked through the window I saw they had a €1,000,000 electric sports car on display. Right in the store, just for show! That’s how insane Hamburg is right now. Big money creeping around everywhere...
But I think the underground is slowly rising again, too! And maybe that’s how Hamburg has always been? City of merchants & pirates.
HCBX: What’s next for you? Any big plans in the pipeline?
LE: Yes.
HCBX: Quality! Final note: anything else to get off your chest?
LE: Thanks for having me on the show again. And thanks for having the patience for this very long interview.
And shouts out to all my friends and supporters who stuck around for all these years! Hardcore will never die!
Go further down the Low Entropy rabbit hole with a few links:
The Hardcore Overdogs: The Hardcore Overdogs: The Hardcore Overdogs e-zine turns two!
Doomcore/Omnicore/Slowcore Bandcamp: Music | Doomcore Records
Low Entropy on Discogs: Low Entropy Discography: Vinyl, CDs, & More | Discogs
Low Entropy on YouTube: (783) Low Entropy - YouTube
