LudoWic (NL)

About

LudoWic, the Dutch musician Thijs Lodewijk, is one of a tiny handful of people in the world who owns and plays a Mixtur Trautonium, a rare and fiendishly complex electronic instrument with roots going back to 1930s Berlin. Rather than a keyboard, the Trautonium uses a resistor wire pressed against a metal plate, allowing the player to glide, bend and shape sound in ways no conventional synth can replicate. The Mixtur version adds subharmonic oscillators and formant filters, making it one of the most demanding electronic instruments ever built. LudoWic has taken the instrument into some unexpected corners. His recent work includes compositions for the Katana ZERO video game soundtrack, and he has also released Mixtur Trautonium exercises that show off the instrument's strange, otherworldly palette. In a 2024 broadcast of Podium Klassiek, he performed Ennio Morricone's theme from Once Upon a Time in the West on his Trautonium alongside pianist Sven Figee, a pairing that says a lot about his range.