For much of his career, Lang Father has made music in other people’s worlds. The Berlin-based composer and producer has moved between hip hop, R&B, artist collaborations and screen composition, including work with Timbaland and a publishing relationship with Sony, but his new two-track EP I (Junkyard Dog), released via WeLoFi, represents something rather different: the point at which those disparate influences have begun to coalesce into music that feels distinctly his own.
“For me, this is my first time releasing solo material where I feel like it’s really representative of who I am and what I’m trying to express. I’ve made instrumental music before but it was very much a pastiche of Burial, who is one of my top 5 dead or alives. That was a good project, but it was true to me as a person and musician.”
There’s always an idea or a sense of communication when I make any piece of art or music
That search for something more personal has taken Lang Father towards a strain of house music informed by Moodymann and Theo Parrish, but also by jazz, hip hop, krautrock and the visual thinking of his work as a film composer. Instrumental music, in particular, gives him the freedom to pull those worlds together without having to pin down exactly what they mean.
“I think there’s always an idea or a sense of communication when I make any piece of art or music, whatever it might be. For instrumental music in particular, I always feel a sense of freedom. You know, you can use film samples and vocal phrases, and you can pull things from all over media and kind of create these big kind of almost sample-orchestral sonic tapestries. And they can either create a vibe or they can have a direct message that’s been re-contextualized from the original piece.”
Jazz sits particularly deep within that approach. His father is a jazz drummer and his grandfather was, in Lang Father’s words, “the biggest kind of, like, fifties jazz hipster”, but it was only when he began exploring house on his own terms that he recognised another route into that musical inheritance.
“When I started diving into making house music the way I wanted to make it, you know, with these kind of deep rich textures, it felt like the closest I would be able to get to being able to make jazz. I’m a longtime jazz lover. My dad is a jazz drummer. My granddad was, like, the biggest kind of, like, fifties jazz hipster. when I started making these records and this… the sense of fluidity and how deep I could go with kind of sonic texture and diving into different modal structures, um, it really… I found myself almost feeling like I was making, like, my version or the closest I could get to making a jazz record.”
That sense of fluidity runs throughout I (Junkyard Dog), where fragments repeat, shift and gradually assume different meanings rather than building towards obvious structural pay-offs. His fascination with repetition began much earlier, as a teenager in Dublin discovering German progressive rock and kosmische alongside hip hop, house and techno, with formative encounters with Surgeon and Jon Hopkins adding another perspective on what repetitive electronic music could do.
“Diving into repeating rhythms that morph and gradually alter as you listen deeper and deeper, like when you say a word 50,60 times and you feel it becomes a collection of sounds and the meaning of the word starts to fall away.”
There is a similar tension between precision and imperfection in the way the EP was made. Much of the percussion is synthetic, but Lang Father deliberately works against the exactness available to him, allowing small inconsistencies and gestures to suggest the physical behaviour of a drummer, while samples and older musical ideas are repurposed and processed until their original context becomes largely irrelevant.
“On these records, that was almost everything. I really wanted to use synthetic drum programming and make it feel as human as possible. There are moments where cymbals get hit and they’re a little off, or something gets hit and immediately muted, like a drummer putting their hand on it. All the instrumentation is very much played as one specific idea, and I won’t go back and fix it, though I might move things slightly to make it feel more human.”
There is also an unusually specific listening perspective behind the record. Lang Father goes to clubs but isn’t particularly comfortable in crowds, often finding himself experiencing the music from the back of the room or even from somewhere adjacent to it, an experience that fed directly into the weight and submerged detail of these tracks.
“I was going out to clubs, and I’m not a big fan of crowds, so I often find myself hearing music at parties from the other room, or from the back of the room. I wanted to create that mode, that mood, that experience I have when I go out.”
For all the thought embedded in the music, the title I (Junkyard Dog) began rather less seriously. The “I” comes from a vocal sample repeating the word at the end of each bar, while Junkyard Dog was lifted from a line in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. From there, however, Lang Father began constructing a strangely specific character around it.
Music can be so expansive and I can get lost in these images in my head
“The title Junkyard Dog comes from a movie sample at the beginning of the track, from Jackie Brown, the Quentin Tarantino film. It’s Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Tucker’s characters talking, and Samuel L. Jackson says he’s going to introduce him to his lawyer, who’s “ferocious, like a junkyard dog.” I started thinking about that. Is it a stray dog living at a dump somewhere in LA? But what’s a junkyard as opposed to a dump? A junkyard has car parts, broken automobiles, machinery. So I imagined this almost mafia-like character, an anthropomorphic dog, and the track became the mood and environment this nocturnal creature was living in as it went about its day.”
That imaginary world is less of a departure from his other work than it might initially appear. Coming from screen composition, Lang Father tends to experience music visually, seeing colours, shapes and movement around individual elements, and with this project some of that internal imagery has been allowed to become part of its public identity. Working closely with creative director and graphic designer Weroinka Kazmierczak, he has built the visual language around blue, water and silhouettes, extending the atmosphere of the records beyond the music itself.
“I feel like music can be so expansive and I can get lost in these images in my head. When I listen to a piece of music, I see so many images and colors. I can see every detail of a track or a composition weaving, ebbing, and flowing around me in this Visionary way. Maybe it’s colors and shapes, and those shapes have different colors or move in different ways representing different instruments. Music is so visually imaginative for me that it’s almost like I’m creating these abstract dances and graphic designs, animated in my head.”
Lang Father doesn’t necessarily regard hip hop production, songwriting, soundtrack composition and house as different expressions of exactly the same thing, describing them instead as “different languages, or maybe dialects of the same language.” When working for another artist there is a destination and a set of references to serve, whereas his solo work removes that target and gives him space to discover what connects his own ideas.
Two threads have become increasingly apparent: jazz, which has been present since childhood, and music as a form of personal processing. “One is a deep sense of working something out through therapeutic self-expression, since I’ve dealt with a lot in the past and have always found music to be a solace for that. The other is an undercurrent of jazz in everything I do, which I love, because that’s what I was raised on.”
After years spent producing, composing, mixing and helping realise other people’s ideas, Lang Father now wants his screen composition and experimental instrumental work to develop alongside one another, rather than treating either as a diversion from the other.
“I’m at the front for this work, but the real goal is to score films at the highest and most creative level, while also having this other side where I create experimental instrumental projects and records. I want those two worlds to run in parallel. That’s what I’m building toward.”
Or, in considerably less formal terms:
“I wanna be like a crossbreed of Ludwig Göransson, Moodyman and Madlib in Bottega Veneta Chelsea Boots”
i(Junkyard dog) is out now on Welofi