In The Studio With | Hainbach

Motivated by a fascination for high-end research equipment and turning gear from old sheds and nuclear research labs into sound, Danny Turner talks to Hainbach about his latest album

  Landfill Totems

© Aleksander Stojanov

Sitting on the periphery of the ambientexperimental genre, German producer Stefan Goetsch possesses an unrestrained enthusiasm for all things vintage Consumed since childhood by radio frequencies and sine tones, his releases as Hainbach typically consist of shifting audio landscapes based on the creative limitations of discarded gear taken from electronic landfill sites.

His latest album, Landfill Totems, typifies the producer’s approach to production and composition. Conceived from an art instillation/performance based on three huge sculptures constructed from obsolete high-end research equipment, Goetsch went on a journey to discover their unforeseen capacity for creating immersive tonal meditations.

We understand that your love of electronic sound derived from the dial on a radio. Tell us about that early fascination?

“When I first heard John Peel on the radio and his cassette tape reruns from German free broadcasts I was suddenly hooked because these were sounds that I’d never heard before. It was very exciting to me and I wanted to make electronic music like that. At the time I was in a band and wanted to explore these things, but as a student I didn’t have money to buy a synthesiser. Instead I used a radio that had nice speakers and found that once you turned the dial all the way to the left you could hear all these heavily modulated sequences from the Euro signal. I started to play the dial on the radio with my left hand and the piano with my right, recording them through the left and right inputs of a cassette tape.”

What forms of music did Peel alert you to?

“In the mid ’90s I religiously adored everything that came out on Warp Records and Rephlex. I discovered Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, which completely changed everything for me and I started to look for sounds that came from that world. Except for one or two tracks that I’d programme out, the album had a sense of complete peacefulness, and that’s how I wanted to make music. I remember living in a small room at university filled with gear and just a mattress – I’d get up, go to the mixer, make music and then lie down and go into this hypnogogic dream state.”

Can you remember some of the gear that you used on those early experiments?

“I remember experimenting with radio and tape, but needed to get these sounds that I’d sampled onto my Casio SK-1 sampler, which could only store one sample and when the battery went out it was gone for good. Then I heard about synths that were supposed to be able to make almost every sound and bought a Roland JP-8000. Because it had the most knobs on it I thought it must be able to make all the noises I wanted, but after a while I realised I couldn’t replicate the exact 8-bit sounds made from the radio, crushed in the SK-1 and pitched down, but it was still good enough to use live.”