Lang Father’s musical education started with a homemade jazz cassette. Given to him by his granddad when he was born and subsequently played hundreds of times on an old boombox, its contents are now lost, but its influence runs through a career that has taken him from hip hop production in New York to film composition, experimental electronic music and, more recently, house.
Now based in Berlin, that breadth feeds directly into I (Junkyard Dog), his new two-track EP for WeLoFi. Across I (Junkyard Dog) and Runnin’, Lang Father draws connections between the looseness of J Dilla, the raw swing of Moodymann and Theo Parrish, and the freedom he finds in jazz, while resisting the urge to settle too comfortably into any one musical language.
We spoke to him about that formative cassette, learning his craft in New York, making fifty versions of a track, his renewed Kraftwerk obsession, portable studios and why curiosity remains at the centre of everything he makes.
What kind of music did you grow up around, and when did making it yourself first become something you took seriously?
One of my earliest musical memories is a jazz cassette that my granddad made for me when I was born. I had this really old boombox with a tape deck and a CD player, and I must have played that cassette hundreds of times. Looking back, it’s probably the single most influential piece of music media in my entire musical journey.
I also remember hearing people like Bruce Springsteen, Fatboy Slim and Carlos Santana around the house, but that jazz tape was different. It became something I kept returning to, almost instinctively, and I think that’s where my love of jazz really began. I’m a huge jazz fan now, and when I think about where that obsession started, it goes right back to sitting in front of that old boombox listening to the cassette my granddad made for me.
I wish I still had it. I’d love to know exactly what was on it.
You’ve ended up with a musical life that takes in hip hop, house, film scores and work with other artists. Was that breadth always there, or did one thing gradually lead to another?
A lot of it happened gradually. Moving from the US to Berlin exposed me to different people, different communities and different opportunities, but the shift wasn’t something that happened overnight.
Hip hop is where my career really began. It’s what gave me my first real opportunities as a working music professional, so I wanted to go as deep into that world as. Hip hop feels like faith like you’re always in it. I’m still always sending beats and ideas to all the artists I came up around in NY, Miami, and then I’ll get the opportunity to pitch for someone bigger or something. That will never stop. At the same time, I’d always had a love for more experimental music, film scoring and dance music, but I didn’t want to jump into those areas before I felt I’d earned it creatively.
I’m quite deliberate about what I put out into the world. It can take me a long time to arrive at a place where I feel confident that the work genuinely reflects what I’m trying to express. Lately, it’s not been about moving quickly or chasing the next thing. It’s about reaching a point where I feel I’ve developed enough creatively to say something meaningful before I move into a new space.
What are you listening to away from your own work at the moment? Anything that’s caught you completely off guard recently?
I’ve gone completely back down the Kraftwerk rabbit hole. I had a big Kraftwerk phase when I was about eighteen or nineteen, and they’ve always been somewhere in the background for me, but recently it’s become a full obsession again. I bought an Autobahn T shirt, someone tagged me in a post that used a Kraftwerk song, and I took it as a sign to dive back in. I’ve basically had the This Is Kraftwerk playlist on repeat, and then I spent a lot of time with Radio Activity. It finally feels like I’m really absorbing their catalogue in a deeper way. They’re just incredible.
I’ve also been listening to the new Boy Harsher album, Scour Order by Krallice, and the new singles from Ovrkast’s upcoming album Striking. I always pay close attention to what Ludwig Göransson is doing as well, so I’ve been studying his score for The Odyssey. Every time he releases something, I want to understand how he’s evolving as a composer and what decisions he’s making.
Before all of that, I went through a huge Miles Davis and John Coltrane phase. I was playing the records they made together almost constantly, and that was actually the music I had on while I was making Junkyard Dog and Runnin’. Those tracks are obviously much more minimal than the jazz I was listening to, but I think what I was borrowing wasn’t the sound so much as the feeling. It was the sense of freedom, fluidity and openness that comes from great jazz, and trying to find a way to express that within a much more stripped back musical language.
You’ve spent time working with some very accomplished producers and musicians. Who have you learned the most from simply by watching how they work?
The person who probably had the biggest impact on me as a producer was a producer and songwriter called La Chaleur. He was an engineer and producer in New York who really took me under his wing around 2018 or 2019, and completely changed the way I thought about making music.
Up until then, I was learning a lot through experience, but he showed me an entirely different philosophy. Nothing felt boxed in. Everything was loose, free and expressive. He’d show me how to find a certain swing or bounce, why something sat where it did, and how to build ideas that felt alive rather than simply following the grid. It wasn’t just technical either. It was a way of thinking about creativity that encouraged experimentation instead of perfection.
Later on I got opportunities to work with bigger artists and was writing and producing professionally, but this was the first time I had someone who was significantly more experienced than me sit down and genuinely explain why he was making certain decisions. That was invaluable.
I honestly don’t think I’d be the producer or composer I am today without him. He gave me a completely new set of technical skills, but more importantly, he opened my mind to what was actually possible inside something as simple as a DAW session. Once you start seeing music that way, you stop thinking in terms of rules and start thinking in terms of possibilities.
What are you actually using to make music at the moment? Is your studio mostly in the box, hardware-based, or somewhere between the two?
Right now, most of my work happens in Ableton. I’ve got my little room with lovely Focals, Audient interface and my brand new MacBook Pro (my last one was from 2017 and the w, s, and x keys didn’t work lol) and my 88 key piano keyboard is fully foldable and fits in my backpack. I don’t have a huge studio full of hardware, and honestly I don’t really want one yet. I love that I can fit my entire setup into a backpack and work from anywhere, while still being able to create at the level I want to create.
A lot of my time is spent on sound design. I’ll open different VSTs and spend hours building sounds, running them through chains of effects, resampling them over and over, adding grit, texture and imperfections, and trying to blur the line between something that feels completely digital and something that feels like it exists in a real physical space. It’s less about finding presets and more about discovering sounds that feel unique and emotionally believable.
Outside of the computer, I write a lot on a cello that I’ve restrung B, E, A, D from the bottom, so it’s almost like a piccolo double bass. I call it a “5 string cello” little instrument nerd joke. Bass was really the first instrument I connected with after piano, so having that deeper register on a cello feels very natural to me. I’ll sit with it around the house and come up with little melodic fragments or bass lines, and those ideas often become the starting point for much larger pieces once I bring them into Ableton.
I haven’t actually recorded that instrument yet. It’s become more of a sketchbook than a featured instrument, but I have a feeling it’ll eventually find its way onto a record. Right now, it’s just part of how I think through ideas before they become fully realised pieces of music.
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The drums on I (Junkyard Dog) have a loose, dusty character. How did you build the rhythm section, and how typical is that of the way you work?
I love those drums so much because they feel like this massive barrage of tiny, beat-up details all mashed together, but then spread out across the whole frequency spectrum. There’s so much information happening in them, but it still feels like one cohesive movement.
They’re not necessarily the most typical way I would work. They were made very quickly and very loosely, but that was completely intentional. I wanted everything to have this kind of lilting, almost drunken feeling, where things are slightly falling over each other but still locked into a really strong sense of groove.
I think a comparison that comes to mind is almost like, what if J Dilla made a house track? Not that I was consciously thinking about that while making them, but more in terms of the philosophy behind it: the feeling of something being imperfect, human and constantly moving. The groove is there, but it’s not rigid. It has space and it has a kind of instability that makes it feel alive.
That isn’t normally how I would approach drums, but I think it represents a lot of what I naturally gravitate toward. I’m really interested in bounce and rhythm that feels like it’s stumbling or lurching back and forth while still having a very clear pulse.
A lot of those ideas came from different places: people like Moodymann and Theo Parrish, but also the whole world of experimental hip hop, from J Dilla to Madlib and early flying lotus, and understanding different ways of creating movement and swing. Those influences aren’t necessarily about copying a sound, but about understanding different approaches to groove and beat making.
And these two tracks were really the result of a much bigger process. They weren’t the only ideas I made. They came from a lot of different experiments, sketches and directions until eventually I reached the point where I thought, these are the two pieces that represent where I want to go right now.
Runnin’ gets a lot out of relatively few elements. Did it begin that stripped back, or was there a process of taking things away until you found the version that worked?
I’m really big on making versions. I’ll often do fifty or sixty different versions of something, and they can be completely different from each other. Some might be really full, some might be incredibly minimal, sometimes it’s just the bass and no drums, sometimes it’s just the vocal sample and the bassline. Sometimes the entire intention changes. Sometimes it’s a different mix approach or different levels, and suddenly the whole bounce and feeling of the track changes.
So for me, it wasn’t necessarily about constantly taking things away or adding new elements. It was more about creating all these different possibilities and then recognising when I arrived at the version that felt right, and then developing that one further.
Once I had all the melodic details from the samples working together and everything started to lock into place, I knew I didn’t want to keep moving things around or adding more. It became a moment of trusting the idea and saying, this is what the track is now. This is the direction.
There wasn’t really a rulebook for that track either. It’s almost operating more like a disco groove than a traditional house track. It’s barely following the expectations of what a house song should be. The bounce is very human, and then around that you have all these sampled pianos, sampled vocals and other elements creating the world around it.
That made it a really unusual track for me because the construction was completely outside of anything I’d really done before. But at the same time, it felt natural. It felt like I was discovering a new way of building something, and that feeling of being onto something is what kept me following it.
After working across so many different kinds of music, what’s one studio habit or production lesson that you now find yourself applying to almost everything you make?
To never stop learning, always see everything like a child and be endlessly curious, and always open to changing perspectives, and just loving music and loving creativity.