cassette Archives - Martin Yam Møller

Max Würden – Field Midi

1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?

All 16 knobs on the DJ Techtools Midi Fighter Twister.
They turn control into an instrument and give me an indestructible kind of freedom. I don’t think in parameters anymore, I think in gestures.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

Right now my setup feels complete. In most cases, it lets me focus entirely on sound instead of technology.
The only thing missing is a new Eurorack case, purely for space reasons. And of course, if there’s more space, there will be more modules. That’s not gear lust, that’s gravity.
If I could wish for one more thing, I’d love to see Nana Modules release a Caixa 208.

3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?

In my last live set, I used my laptop, the Midi Fighter Twister, the Arturia MicroBrute, the KOMA Electronics Field Kit and Field Kit FX, and my DIY soundbox filled with kalimba, an egg slicer, and other objects. The soundbox has become an essential part of my practice, both on stage and in the studio, and I’ve been working with different versions of it for over ten years.
Overall, it’s a small system, but one that still allows me to lose control.

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

I sometimes wish Ableton itself existed as a physical instrument.
Not a controller, but a real object with resistance, weight, and limits.
I wouldn’t want any of my hardware as software. I chose it as hardware for a reason.

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

I try to keep the things I might regret selling.
That makes storage complicated, but it keeps my past intact.
Still, I had to let go of a Korg electric piano once, space won, music lost.

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

I switched to Ableton more than 17 years ago.
It was the first time the tool stepped out of the way of listening and working.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

An analog synthesizer. Any one.
It teaches you signal flow, patience, and listening.
Eventually it teaches you something about the universe and about yourself.

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

My headphone cable.
It constantly gets caught under my office chair wheels and pulls me back into the room.
A reminder that sound is physical, and so am I.

9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

The biggest trick was realizing that looping isn’t repetition, it’s a way of listening longer to the same moment.

Artist or Band name?

Max Würden

Genre?

Ambient, Experimental, Sound Art, Field Recording

Selfie?

Where are you from?

Cologne, Germany.

How did you get into music?

As far back as I can remember, I was always surrounded by music, from waking up until falling asleep.
When I was very young, I had a key moment: I suddenly understood how a band works, which instruments are played, how they sound, and what their roles are. That realization sparked my desire to learn an instrument and start making music myself. In the 1980s I learned to play drums and spent many years playing in bands, from indie rock to jazz. In the 1990s I began making solo recordings with 4-track recorders, effects and guitars, trying to free myself from the band format. When more powerful computers became available, I chose to move fully into electronic music and work solo. I’m entirely self-taught in this area.
What I carried over from my band years is a love for using all kinds of sound sources, mostly analog ones, often treated as instruments rather than tools.

What still drives you to make music?

What drives me is the search for calm inside sound.
I’m interested in making music from my surroundings rather than for them, a quiet contradiction to the original idea of ambient.
Real sounds have always been essential to my work. Field recordings have been part of my music from the beginning.

How do you most often start a new track?

I start with the desire to make sound and to become calm.
Anything can be the beginning: a tone, a chord, something in my hands.
The desire is what starts the next project.

How do you know when a track is finished?

I know a track is finished when I fall asleep while listening to it.
Unfinished tracks keep me awake, because I still hear what needs to be changed.

Show us your current studio

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

Listen longer than you think you should, and trust what remains.
It’s never the one session, it’s the many sessions.
That’s something I had to learn myself.

Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.

My latest project is RAUSCHKASSETTE, a collaborative cassette release with Ron Schmidt. It treats noise as the main material for a continuous narrative, moving through shifting textures toward a quiet, meditative stillness.
https://wuerden.bandcamp.com/album/rauschkassette
I’m also featured on KOMPAKT’s POP AMBIENT 2026, together with LUKAS SCHÄFER, as part of the long-running, Wolfgang Voigt–curated series dedicated to beatless, elegant ambient music.
https://kompakt.bandcamp.com/album/pop-ambient-2026

Marc Aubele – dB-ele

1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?

The pitch control on my modded Walkmans.. This lets me tune my tape loop drones and samples to other musicians and play the tape like a synth / pitched instrument. It’s hard to measure the exact range but i figure its approximately +/- 2 octaves.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

This combines sampling with real time pitching, looping and FX.. most people here probably know all about it I’ve had nearly all the Kaoss pads in my musical kit at various times but in my opinion Korg hit perfection with this
device. Every rebuild or updated KP never got near- it’s so hands on it feels like a guitar or a synth It’s hard to find a fault but to be over picky, the external midi sync (which i never use) is not great.

3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?

I always travel light so its my Laptop. The act of travel I always find inspirational. the sense of motion and chaos all around is a crazy energy and i like to work in the midst of that. I’m generally doing video work (Davinci Resolve) or Ableton while in transit.

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

Granular synthesis -there are a few great plugins for this- i’d love a hardware version with real time input if possible.. i know there is a Mutable device out there but i don’t own one. perhaps ill get me one for Christmas I’d love if it was possible to emulate a Tapeloop in software.. I’ve tried (badly) coding something like this a few times and there is something approaching an emu on my website, but it’s so basic and doesn’t get near what you can do with actual tapes.

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

I once owned a Fender Rhodes.. When i bought it me and a buddy carried about 1km back to my house because we couldn’t get a taxi to stop.. it was so heavy! i sold it at a
time when i really needed cash.. it paid the rent that month. On buying.. no. if i don’t like something i’ll usually sell it on or gift it. I’m quite active in the second hand market.

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

Its 2 fold.. I started out in music playing guitar, recording into tape machines.. firstly boom boxes and standard tape machines (anything that would record basically) soon into this journey i needed to start dubbing so 4-tracks and eventually reel to reel machines. I still use this setup alot but nowadays the process is often in reverse.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

A good workhorse hardware polyphonic synth with 2 or 3 oscillators and a great filter / LFO.. You can do so much with synthesis that you can’t do with most other instruments on their own.

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that
you just can’t live without?

Again its the PWM modded tape players I use for live performances. Because the machines are so old and fragile and i can’t resist tweaking the mods they are often breaking down. that’s why i always have 2 in my rig so i can at least guarantee i’ll get a sound out of one of them.

9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

I enjoy it when you can make a piece of kit “play itself” like the krell patch in modular world or when you get a synth to self oscillate or a guitar to feedback and you start playing, or more precisely trying to control the instrument.

Artist or Band name?

Marc Aubele

Genre?

Anti Pop

Selfie?

Where are you from?

I grew up in the cotswolds in the english countryside but spent time in Germany as a teenager before coming back to London to go to College. I’m half Irish, half German and i now live in a very rural area of Wexford which i adore. I genuinely feel at home in any of these 3 countries.

How did you get into music?

As a kid i was completely obsessed by football/soccer and was heading towards a career in sports until a new music teacher arrived at the school in Frankfurt. I was around 13 at the time and in the first lesson of term, at the start of the class, the Teacher pulled out a record player and played 3 songs. “Battery” by Metallica, “Satisfaction” by the Stones and “I don’t need no doctor” by WASP. my parents played
alot of music in the house and in the car but it was a lot of 60s and 70s stuff.. I had never heard anything like the heavy metal before. i went out with my pocket money that weekend and bought Master of Puppets and a Stones greatest hits which was as
far as the pocket money stretched. I stopped playing sports immediately and got a guitar for my next birthday. I played literally every waking moment outside of school, learning songs by listening to them and playing along and i gone then.

What still drives you to make music?

If you fall hard into it I think music is something like a vocation rather than a trade or a hobby. Every time i step into my studio I feel something like inocent. I love that you can walk in to the space and when you walk out something exists that didn’t before.

How do you most often start a new track?

I’m sometimes pulled into the studio because an idea drops into my head and i need to go and work it out.. sometimes i just sit down with the gear because i’m bored. Typically i start with Tape, synth or guitar i never start with a beatloop for example and just “see what happens”.. Also playing with other people helps bring things out. I’ve been playing with an improvised ensemble “Der-Aunch-A-Thon” for a little over a year now.. We do gigs where we improvise every note from start to finish of the gig. It’s exhilarating as you don’t know whats happening beyond the moment you’re in and you exist in the moment of creation all the time. Last thing we did was go to a house in Donegal where we built “a studio” on the Friday, played all night and all
Saturday and left on Sunday. We will be releasing that in some form either late this year or early next. It will be a long form work.

How do you know when a track is finished?

I think you just have to call it. Often demos are better than the finished article, often a session is finished when My Cat Marjorie wants us to go to bed

Show us your current studio

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

“It’s the goal of every artist to give of their very best just once” – a friend once wrote that in a dedication of a book he gave me. The book was Barfly by Charles Bukowski. That was a long time ago and it still inspires me.

Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link

This is my last long form release.. it’s called “There is a Chasm between what is Said and what is Done” Pt1

LennyTunes – Beats from Jaffa’r Away

1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?

The glorious Pultec EQ switches and knobs have the empowering effect of making you feel like you’re doing something meaningfully right.
It’s a cruel lie unfortunately.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

The Roland SH-1000 is a magical wild beast. It has it all, mojo-wise and sound-wise – but lacks midi, stable oscillators and a decent keyboard.

Also – Dear Elektron please add 1 more LFO to the Rytm. It’s so close to perfection.

3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?

On holiday I will usually try and revert to my other senses, and give my ears a bit of a rest.. but I will occasionally bring a portable recorder to capture a few interesting sounds. (Like my father’s old Kenwood cassette recorder).
On tour (it constantly changes..) – Elektron Rytm/Analog4 + Roland AE7 + Moog Phatty/Jen SX1000 + Korg Wavedrum.

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

I wish we had more old school “ethnic” arranger keyboards in software emulation. Love those sounds.. and I can’t live without my quarter-tone mini keys:)

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

Yes, stupidity was inevitable, but regret is pointless. Lately I do wish I had my old Oberheim SEM to play around with.😢

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

I would have to give this one to the almighty Tascam 424. It’s how I got my first experience of producing and multitracking music, back in my teen years.
I recently recorded my “film Grain” album, on 2 cassettes, tape loops and bucket-brigade delays, so occasionally, it still puts its enchanting spells on me.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

I’m pretty sure starting over with only a laptop, or a couple of groove boxes, would not feel limiting in any way.. as boring or predictable as it sounds.
But in case of a climate catastrophe or zombie apocalypse, I would probably be stringing a tortoise shell, at some point, and be fully happy starting over as the local weirdo bard.

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

I don’t think I’ll get any arguments against this one – surely, it has to be cables.

9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

Delay – it makes you play less.
Also, manipulating tape speed and sculpting reverb echo repeats, it really wonderfully showcases how music can explore the human concept of time.