Daniel Hunt of electronic pop icons Ladytron told us about his love for his Kawai K1ii synth...
Daniel Hunt: My choice of a piece of gear I can’t do without would be a surprise to those who’ve followed Ladytron since the beginning. It would even to me back then. We were analogue purists before it became the industry it now is. Our equipment was cheap and unfashionable at the time, picked up at flea markets as junk before becoming the valuable collectors items those keyboards are nowadays. There was not the ostentatiousness about gear that there now is. Anyway, it was improbable to go to a show in 1999 and see 4 kids playing old analogue synths and nothing else, trying to set up in rock venues who treated us like extraterrestrials. Maybe we were.
So the piece of gear I consider my go to right now is something I probably wouldn’t have even looked at when we began. A Kawai K1ii synth. It would’ve seemed too new and aesthetically had dated badly. Little did I know. During a binge of acquiring new old equipment a few years back, much of what I’d always wanted as a teenager but could never have afforded - I was basically building a 1989 studio of my adolescent imagination - I picked one of these up (that one became several) and found it to be such a beautiful thing, my favourite of all.
It was the first synth Japanese piano maker Kawai deemed of quality enough to bear their name, having previously released synths under the Teisco brand. It was their budget answer to Korg’s M1 and Roland’s D50. The main riff on LFO’s LFO was actually a preset on the K1. The K1 and other similar gear was catalytic for the new record. Experimenting with an entirely new sound palette, sounds with different logic and values attached to them, playing with cheap unfashionable equipment again like we did at the beginning.
Ladytron's album Paradises is out now.
Photo Credit: Mark McNulty
