Name: Light Conductor
Members: Stephen Ramsay, Jace Lasek
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Composers, producers, songwriters, vocalists, multi-instrumentalists
Interviewee: Stephen Ramsay
Current Release: Light Conductor's new album Sequence Three is out September 25th 2026 via Constellation.
Krautrock Recommendations: Riechmann - Wunderbar (check out the song “Himmelblau”); Harald Grosskopf – Synthesist
Recommendations for Montreal, Canada: Visit the stuffed animal repair shop, Raplapla, they also have an ambulance for emergency stuffed animal repair situations!

If you enjoyed this Light Conductor interview and would like to know and hear more, visit the band on Instagram, and bandcamp.



How would you describe your personal relationship with Krautrock? When and how did it start?

I would say sometime around the late 1990s? I had heard Kraftwerk at that point, but didn’t really know they were associated with Krautrock at that point.

I think the advent of Napster really opened up a whole world of music that was previously unavailable to a lot of music fans, because it was often prohibitively expensive to import or find the original pressings of a lot of these albums when we were growing up. I remember suddenly having access to Can and Neu! And other records like those that were either the stuff of legend already or just being rediscovered at that point.

[Read our Michael Rother of Neu! Interview]
[Read our Michael Rother of Neu! Interview about improvisation]

My personal relationship with Krautrock was one of instant fascination, as it felt largely unmoored from any obvious influences of previous genres of music.

Tell me about one or two of your favourite Krautrock records please.

Well, there are the obvious choices I guess - Kraftwerk, Can, Neu!, but I think one that sits outside of the immediate central canon that endures to this day for me is Manuel Gottsching’s solo album, E2-E4.

He was in the seminal Krautrock band, Ash Ra Tempel, and this album is essentially one hour long movement of proto-techno. It was recorded in the early 80s, I believe - but it still sounds contemporary to this day. He was a guitarist originally, but this piece of music was largely made using analog synthesizers and drum machines, though there are some pretty amazing passages where he’s just ripping guitar solos over it, haha.

I love it, it is very deep, hypnotic and shifting … it really draws you in. I think it’s better for being an hour long, it’s an incredible record to do a road trip to. And like I said, it sounds like it could have been made yesterday, despite being over 40 years old.

[Read our Manuel Göttsching interview]
[Read our feature on E2-E4]

I also adore Popol Vuh, such beautiful guitar playing and tone on some of those albums, especially Herz Aus Glas, the soundtrack they did for the Werner Herzog film where apparently all the actors were under hypnosis.



The track “Engel der Gegenwart” is an all timer for me, it makes my eyes roll back in my head with satisfaction.

I also think their song “Letzte Tage Letzte Nächte” is one of the heaviest songs ever. It sounds like honey dripping from the sun.



Many of the original Kraut musicians loved blues, rock, and psychedelia; they were intrigued by electronics and improvisation; they rebelled against virtuosity, classical education and the superficiality of Schlager on German radio. How much of that do you recognise in your own creative preferences and interests?

Well Light Conductor is almost entirely improvised, so we are definitely imbued with the spirit of Krautrock. There is very little communicating beforehand about what we are setting out to do.

When we first started the project, Jace and I were interesting in exploring electronic music, as we both came from more traditional rock or band oriented sounds. We were trying to largely do away with the process that is necessary to managing bands and songwriting … what would happen if we just started playing without an end goal in mind? I think that is very in line with some of the central tenets in Krautrock - there was a deliberate thirst to do away with something deliberate, something rooted in the past.

We wanted to make space music in the sense that the listener could float inside it and interpret it any way they liked. We wanted to make a container for world building, as opposed to the world itself.

Both in the music and the way it was made, Krautrock was about imagining different worlds. What is the experience of listening to this music like for you and what kinds of worlds is it taking you to? What is your preferred way of listening to it?

I touched on it in the last question, I think - but I see Krautrock less like world building and more like a container for world building for the listener.

There is something essentially expansive and hypnotic about a lot of Krautrock, you can feel the artists letting the music take them somewhere that they aren’t necessarily in control of.

So much of it is good driving music, because it is a genre that tends to unspool as you listen to it, you get to kind of go internal listening to it and let your mind drift in a really appealing way.

A lot of the Kraut spirit came to life through musicians living in communities, playing and recording together every single day. Have you ever tried working and creating in such a constellation? Is it possible to emulate this process from a home studio?

I think it’s safe to say that the 70s in particular were a time where people were really experimenting with idealized ways of living, the communal, the rejection of the status quo, etc. I’m too old and cynical for that now lol.

We like to cosplay this kind of thing while we’re making the music, so we do this for maybe 3 days. Yes, when Light Conductor makes albums, we live in a commune for 3 days, haha.

Our music is very processed based - so there is a lot more thought put into the set up of our instruments and how they will interact with each other, than even what we end up playing. So once we have our chain of instruments and effects all pieced together, we start playing and see what comes out, with the sequences we are generating and all of that. Then we kind of tweak as we go.

We barely speak while we play … but we always know when we’ve hit something good. The best example of that was during the making of a song on the new record, Sequence Three, called “Supercontinent.” There was a point in the recording where it felt so locked in and heavy we just stepped back from the instruments in awe and let them play on their own for like 30 minutes.

We went out on the deck where we were recording and noticed the northern lights were visible. So we just sat there listening to the machines jamming and watched the northern lights. It was a very memorable moment.

What instruments or equipment are you using to create your music? Are there any vintage instruments that you find essential to get your sound right?

We tend to favour analog synths for Light Conductor in general, because that’s where we started and we like to twiddle knobs and get in there with manipulating the sounds. I think analog synths are very fun to use with 2 or more people.

The LC first record was just us using my old Sequential Circuits Prophet 600, because it was my first analog synth and we were eager to try out midi sequencing and that kind of thing. Everything we were doing was very naive.

We’re more experienced now, so on the new album we use the Oberheim SEM-Pro, the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS and Prophet 5, an Arp Odyssey, and we always use Jace’s old Roland CR-5000 CompuRhythm drum machine.

I got into Kraut via Tangerine Dream and early Ash Ra and to me, the motoric beat was never quite as important. Today, it seems as though it's the defining element. Are you interested in it? Are you making use if it? What makes it special to you?

I personally love the motorik beat, some people say it was the last recognizable beat invented by an actual drummer … but that’s debatable.

I love that beat because it feels so insistent and weightless, at the same time. Plus, I am a sucker for punishing levels of repetition. I love music that hypnotizes. I think you could say that repetition is important as a concept across all Krautrock, and binds it together.

I can see how the motorik beat relates to the analog sequences of Cluster or Ash Ra, or the one chord riffing of Faust or Parson Sound, as well as in the droning chimes of Popol Vuh. It’s all about hypnosis, in my opinion.