WAX ON
It’s better to have a great idea and a shitty synth than a bad idea and an amazing piece of equipment,” says David Dewaele of electronic icons, remixers, record collectors and innovators Soulwax. If it indeed exists, then David and his brother Stephen should know the equation for musical success. The pair enjoy an unrivalled reputation as creators and curators, having spent more than 20 years unleashing wild genre-splicing sounds on the world under a number of projects and guises. They can be hard to keep up with. “We get bored easily,” says Stephen. “We started DJ’ing because we were bored with playing gigs. In the clubs we went to, no-one was playing the stuff we wanted to hear.”
Beginning their musical lives as self-confessed indie kids, the Belgian duo’s guitar-toting tendencies evolved into the formidable DJ’ing and remixing force 2manydjs in the early 2000s. As their reputation grew, the duo’s sound expanded, with the addition of beefy electronics and more complex rhythms.
“Flood gave us the confidence to experiment. We decided to do everything ourselves”
Outside of music, their aesthetic became a physical reality with the creation of their own modernist musical factory, Studio Deewee. Unveiled in Ghent in the mid-2010s, the complex serves as a label, publishing house and studio. The latest project to come from the house of Deewee is an album that harnesses and celebrates the EMS Synthi 100, an analogue-digital hybrid synthesiser constructed in 1971, of which only 31 were ever made.
The EMS Synthi 100 is so large that it took seven pairs of hands just to get it into Soulwax’s gear-stuffed studio. But despite their deep-rooted passion for vintage equipment, which is in evidence all around their studio and all
