The World According to Shadow Wolf
Intergalactic freak daddy Danny Wolfers offers a unique insight into the many strange corners of life as you probably don't know it
The brain of Danny Wolfers is an odd one, no doubt about it. Known best to your mother through his output as Legowelt and predilection for hoarding synthesisers, his website is also a glittering beacon for samplers, astrologists and victims of the occult.
Billed quite accurately as the 'laundromat of your mind,' Wolfers' semi-regular Order of the Shadow Wolf is one of the strangest webzines out there, coughing up bits of knowledge on everything from the psychoactive properties of garlic to ball lightning experiments that you can conduct in the relative safety of your own microwave.
Now on the verge of a fresh 11-track LP on his own Nightwind Records, Guidance for the Puzzled, we call deep into the cave to see what ideas are currently streaking their way through the mind of the Shadow Wolf.
On… lycanthropy
"Clinical lycanthropy is an actual psychiatric condition, which must surely add a bit of colour to the world. I'm not at that level but I do exploit my affinity with the Canis lupus genus in different ways, even in music. For instance I remember sampling a real wolf howling in my first Occult Orientated Crime album, on the track Norwegian Raven.
"Most of the time I feel more comfortable flying solo but there’s always those times when I enjoy myself and feel comfortable as part of a wolfpack of freaks. But the wolf is probably not my spirit animal. If anything like that exists, I would be a goat or something slightly less vigorous than a wolf. Maybe a fox."
On… blues
"You have to go back to the old blues singers to get the real howlers and growlers – Howlin' Wolf, of course. Another important guy was Blind Willie Johnson, he sounded like an old worn-out wolf. His song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground was actually included on the Golden Record taken by Voyager probes that went into interstellar space.
"The song is just him humming a lament over some really sad blues slide guitar chords... and that's currently floating around somewhere in the vast nothingness of deep space. Long after human civilisation is gone it will still be floating around, waiting to be picked up by alien beings as one of the only remaining relics of human life. It's a really sad, terrifying and incredibly beautiful idea.
"On a side note, I’m learning to play the slide guitar too. Not to make some kind of Moby blues album; it’s going to be more of a dusty Americana tumbleweed desert thing. Brian Eno Apollo style."
On… alien contact
"If aliens did land on Earth I don’t think they’d be too bothered with welcome messages. They would probably just see us as a completely unimportant form of life and wouldn’t even bother to say hello.
"Thinking about it, they would just bring in the galactic shovels and start digging for whatever they need. Maybe there would be some environmentally friendly aliens in that culture who would protest. Like, we would be their dolphins."
On… dark matter and astronomy
"Dark matter is a nice theory for the 85% of our universe that is invisible and unknown. Makes you think that we don’t know anything about anything, which gives us the freedom to devise all these beautiful hypotheses that become so strange that they’re way more mystical than any new-age occult theories.
"There’s too much light pollution where I live so I can’t really dabble in astronomy myself. I tried it a few times but didn’t go further than being part of the SETI Institute's 'at home' network, but I always like to read about that stuff. And yes I’m also a Trekkie, in case you were wondering."
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On… Dutch folklore
"I read a lot into cultures and folklore from around the world. The Frisian mythology is interesting. Around 8,000 years ago when sea levels were still low from the Ice Age there were two huge islands in the North Sea – Doggerland and Vikingberg. When the islands flooded the people fled, and some claim it’s linked to Atlantis. Probably not true.
"This brings up the later legend of Lugdunum Batavorum, which is actually pretty historically accurate. This was a Roman border fortress during the time of Emperor Caligula on the coast of Katwijk, a small fishing village a few miles north of Den Haag (The Hague). The fortress was eventually completely submerged, but even up until a few centuries ago it would occasionally surface and could be sometimes seen during bad storms. Caligula was a crazy guy and apparently ordered an entire Roman legion to fight the North Sea in revenge, declaring war on the Roman god Neptune."
On… language
"I speak Dutch, English and Iyaric – that’s the Rastafarian dialect of English. It’s very interesting from a linguistic point of view and, even beyond that, goes into neuroscience, deep psychology and magic. Kind of like programming your own reality.
"Iyaric uses ‘wordsound’, where the sound of a word or how it is written is thought to have powers and hidden meaning. The power of words can also be changed, so that negative-sounding words become more positive within their meaning, and vice versa.
"For example, in Iyaric you say ‘livication’ instead of ‘dedication’ because ‘ded’ is the same sound as ‘dead’ and therefore doesn’t seem to fit the meaning. It’s an interesting way of looking at the world."
On… musical scales
"I love the Ethiopian scales known as Kiñits. This scale makes things sounds ancient. Music from forgotten civilisations at the dawn of man, almost sacred. It touches your brain in strange places.
"Two of the most well-known Kiñits are Ambassel and Tizita, both are quite mysterious sounding and very melancholic. I always seem to use these scales in one way or another. In a simplified minor-scale version you could use these notes: C, D, Eb, G, Ab."
On… Walt J
"Just take a track like Feel What I Feel – you don’t hear techno music like that anymore.
"This is what real techno is for me, not all that mundane, soulless shit for larval people that is everywhere now. It’s about jamming the drum machines and synth with a simple honest personal message that’s straight out of the heart. Poetry in music is more important than the hardest bass drum..."
"Guys like Nate Krafft who did the cola-coloured Man and Machine EP on Infra Records are connected to all of this. It was, and still is, a real cult record in The Hague scene."
"The remix version is the real jam but hard to find online. This is still really good. Nate Krafft now does music under the name Naquil, some super-cool space funk that’s a bit like Dam Funk with some Model 500 sauce on top. Check out Cosmography, a great album."
On… trains
"I am really into trains lately. It started because I have to travel in them a lot and it got kind of boring. I thought why not check out this whole trainspotter world and make travelling in trains more exciting by knowing what train type you are in, and all about its history.
"My favourite train is the NS Mat '64, which I included in my drawing of the artwork for the new Satomi Taniyama album, which will be out in May or June on Nightwind Records after my own LP as Ufocus. It’s good music to listen to while travelling on a train and looking out of the window. Way better than spending your time on a phone or iPad watching some form of mindless entertainment or another."
Wolfers' latest LP as Ufocus, Guidance for the Puzzled, is out now on his own Nightwind Records