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Luft 3:330:00/3:33
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The Power of Water 3:370:00/3:37
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0:00/4:28
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Serenade 4:070:00/4:07
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Open the Gate 3:430:00/3:43
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New Amsterdam 4:020:00/4:02
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0:00/4:00
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Waverunner Symphony 4:260:00/4:26
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A New Green World 4:310:00/4:31
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Icicles Melting 3:470:00/3:47
Biography
Nicholas Long of Wavewulf
“[The North and the Sea] brought us a sense of urgency and clarity into the actual meaning of freedom. The album’s core concept is not only Wavewulf’s quest for freedom but also the lengths he went to search for and celebrate it.”
New York based Electronic Artist & Producer Wavewulf (aka. Nicholas Long) has been playing synthesizers since he was in middle school. Long grew up listening to his father play guitar as well as to his father’s extensive record collection, which included bands such as Pink Floyd and The Beatles. This early exposure to music lit a spark in him! When he was a kid, Long used to form bands with kids from his neighborhood, he would play (toy) synthesizers such as the Casio SK1 and Yamaha PSS 140, while another friend from around the corner played pots and pans for drums, and later electronic drums. Long was first inspired to seriously play synthesizers at age 13 (in 1991) when he went on a road trip with an older friend to see Depeche Mode and saw them making inspiring music with synthesizers. At this point, Long convinced his parents to buy him his first (real) synthesizer, a Roland Juno 106.
Long grew up in a small college town in Northwest Arkansas. His mother was a school teacher and his father was a sound engineer for the local university, and later owned a small recording studio called “Passing Note Studio”. Wavewulf would later reuse the name “Passing Note Studio” for his own studio in honor of his father (after his fathers death from cancer).
In college, Long was definitely able to hone his skills as a synth player in local college bands, starting to compose music himself using his hardware synthesizers, midi and a sequencer, which he then recorded on a Tascam 4-track.
After graduating from college in 2000, Long moved to Boston in 2001, worked as a graphic designer and social worker for many years (both in Boston and New York City), then decided to go to graduate school to study history and library science (he received his masters degrees in 2015). His graduate thesis was on Kraftwerk and post-war German pop music (especially the Krautrock/Kosmische scene in the 1960s-80s). Long married his sweetheart, Katarina, in 2015 and moved back to the NYC area in 2016 to take a job at a college library.
Wavewulf was founded in 2017 by Long when he came into a small amount of money after his mother’s tragic death (like his father, from cancer). He used this money to invest in (more) analogue synthesizers, drum-machines and some more professional recording equipment. Wavewulf used this new and vintage equipment to record his first (real) album, Oscillation, in the spare room of his New Jersey apartment. Oscillation came out in January of 2019.
Since Oscillation, Wavewulf has expanded his synthesizer collection (Moogs, Korgs, ARPs, Oberheims, etc.) and contacted an old friend from his college band days, Christopher Donato - who now lives in Chicago, to play drums and sing on his second album Green Decay (as well as subsequent albums). Wavewulf recorded Green Decay partly out of frustration with the political environment in the US and around the world, especially regarding the current path political leaders are on toward the destruction of our precious planet. Wavewulf's third album, Space Art and Angels, is a journey through outer space, the cosmos, dimensions beyond our own, and also explores the human condition and soul. Space Art and Angels was released on January 22nd, 2021 to widespread acclaim.
For Wavewulf's latest album, The North and the Sea, which is themed around the North, the Arctic and cold spaces, water, as well as the freedom that comes with traveling, both literally and metaphorically, Wavewulf collaborated with vocalist and co-songwriter, Nala Spark (Long and Spark orignally met in a music for sync class). Spark has since become a Wavewulf songwriting collabrator and a primary Wavewulf vocalist. The album also includes vocals, drums and percussion by longtime Wavewulf collaborator, Christopher Donato, guitars by Bryan Brown as well as vocals by a cast of vocalists from around the world. The album has also generated praise from the likes of LA Weekly, SPIN Magazine, Blitzed Magazine, Electronic Sound, and the BBC, among others. The North and the Sea was released on March 25th, 2022 on State of Bass Records, UK and is now available for purchase on this website or on Bandcamp at: https://wavewulf.bandcamp.com/album/the-north-and-the-sea!
Wavewulf's influences include many of the New Wave and synthesizer-based artists and bands of 1970s through 90s, from Depeche Mode, Brian Eno, David Bowie (especially his Berlin Trilogy era), Yellow Magic Orchestra, New Order, 808 State, Aphex Twin and The Cure; to the Kosmische bands of 1960s-80s Germany such as Kraftwerk (of course), Can, Neu! and Tangerine Dream; to the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer as well as modern composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Jean Michel Jarre; to the 80s soundtracks of John Carpenter; and also the dreamy sounds of bands like The Velvet Underground, Slowdive, The Cocteau Twins; and many more. Some of his more recent favorites include Goldfrapp, Röyksopp, Trentemøller, M83 and Ulrich Schnauss.
Besides the environmental, political and philosophical themes in Wavewulf's music, writing, composing and recording music has been a way for him to deal emotionally with his parents' deaths and to explore the big questions of life, death, the human condition, the soul, the universe and, most importantly, love.
