DJ Led Manville – Der Meister am Mischpult (Master on the Mixer Console)

Here's an article recently published on Necroweb Magazin by Fauna Flokati. It's in german but you can read the english translation below the link (thanks to Maic Shulte).

DJ Led Manville – Der Meister am Mischpult


DJ Led Manville – Master on the Mixer Console

Some may think, as a DJ you don't need to be skilled: Especially in this day and age where many DJs playing their sets with a notebook, you have nothing more to do than to press a few buttons for playing the songs of other artists.

Loyalty club goers know it better: a poor DJ can spoil your desire for dancing and putting on records is an art that requires not only a sense of good combinations, transitions, and the right amount of variety, but also a lot of talent and intuition when it comes to mix a live set.

Of course, in reality actually not every DJ has this talent, but that's not unlike in all other arts, where on a masterpiece comes a lot of something unspectacular or a bit of crap.

The more important it is, to give well-deserved attention to particularly outstanding artists and at this point it is DJ Led Manville from Madrid.



DJ-Sets in trendy nightclubs around the world

Click to enlarge

For more than 25 years the Spaniard plays his sets in clubs all over the world. The 43-year-old took his stage name Led Manville at the age of 17 years, and has since composed numerous songs, mixed, combined with other pieces, and put his stamp on them.

His effective range is wide: While he spent his first years as a DJ in Spain, he abandoned his steady clubs 14 years ago, instead to travel around the world and to inspire international audience in well-known scene clubs with his sets: he was a visiting DJ at the Barfly in Birhimgham, in the Mexico City Underground DJ Army, on the Avantgardia Festival in the Canary Islands and in two famous German trendy nightclubs: the Matrix in Bochum and in the Kultkeller in Duisburg.

Musical variety and original ideas

Led Manville is specialized in electronic music from the black scene, but acting here in very different areas. On his website he states, to specialize in genres such as Electro, EBM, Aggrotech, industrial and gothic. Harsh industrial projects, such as Xotox and aggressive sounds like Combichrist, are still parts of Leds varied DJ sets, as well as synth-pop bands such VNV Nation or And One, and gothic greats like Deine Lakaien or Das Ich. For top-class scene bands like Apoptygma Berzerk or Combichrist he has mixed several of their works, some live and with the artists together, and released as an album.

Not only in terms of genre, but also in relation to the musical accompaniment of his 50 albums, variation plays a great role in Led Manvilles works. He published not only live recorded DJ sets, where he played songs and remixes of other artists refined with own elements, but he also implemented his own ideas or composes his own pieces.

A particularly clever idea was implemented by Led with its "Versus Satanicus" series: In the years 2006 to 2010, the DJ brought out four albums on which he mixed two songs together. The amazing thing was, that they were mixed live and that shows Leds intuition very well: the songs, even those of which you would not assume at first that they ever fit together, are so equal to each other, that you could keep them for one. Wether And One and Combichrist, Mesh and Straftanz or Prodigy and Icon Of Coil - Led Manville reveals ties between songs that the artists themselves probably not know before.

Onto Leds SoundCloud Channel you can also hear some pieces that are completely out of his pen. These songs are called "Miracle", "No One Can Stop Us Now" and "Siren Call". Partially these pieces are completely instrumental, partially he lends his voice to them. Led Manville again proves his talent in dealing with danceable, melodic electronic music and provides tracks with very different, subtle sound elements, from which the sweetish and mellow stand out. Mostly he refined his songs, such as "Mircale", with slightly rocky passages, and despite this variety of different sounds, it is a fascinating harmony that makes the songs.

Who listens to the DJ-Sets, who will be recorded live and published by Led, realises very soon why it makes sense to publish them. Indeed a recorded DJ set later isn't little more than a sampler, but the decisive factor is simply that the Spaniard knows exactly when to do what. He not only combines songs and remixes of other artists very skillful and knows always to place them in the right place, also his seamless transitions and own creative elements that are inserted repeatedly between the songs, brings the club atmosphere right direct to the living-room of the listener and provides a consistency within the entire set, that one rarely finds on samplers.

For example you could take his set from the Kultkeller of 12 November 2012: Even while enjoying a remixed version of Seabound "The Promise", softly in the background, but becoming louder and more dominant, Combi-Christ "All Pain Is Gone" is heard. Led Manville knows how to surprise, because he lays unusual remixes, such as the symbiosis of "I Feel You" by Schiller and Peter Heppner and "Mit Voller Kraft" of Aircrash Bureau, mixed by Humate, but delights the clubbers with the originals of popular scene evergreens such as "Control" of VNV Nation.
DJ announcements may also be controversial and some people may think that they are ridiculous, but Led Manvilles short intros into his sets are just plain cool.

Leds latest project is his "NachtPlan" series, during which he has so far received six albums in 2012 and 2013 extra for the Nachtplan Magazine.

If you would like to bring the club feeling to your house, it's great fun to hear the sets, mixes and original songs by Led Manville, whereby a brilliant set comes off more intense when played live. These knows also the DJ himself and so he travels around the world, playing his sets at different locations, to let the club-scene participate on new DJ-sets. Soon he comes even for an exclusive DJ set to southern Germany. On 31 May 2013 the trendy sceneparty "Nachtwerk" celebrates his eight birthday and has won DJ Led Manville as guest DJ for the occasion.