“I prefer to think like an outsider”, says Leo Hopfinger, a Munich-based artist, about his approach to music. The musician, producer, and DJ works with different musical genres and searches for his own interpretations. “If you open a drawer and you rummage through, you might forget to look into another.”

When it comes to alternative music, Leo Hopfinger is in his zone. As a multi-instrumentalist, he plays the guitar, harmonica, percussions, and sometimes the piano to create individual sounds from scratch. Field recordings, sampling, and original sequences give his music that certain something. He plays around with analogue and digital tools to pull off electro beats outside the sound library. Since his youth, he was part of various bands and has been influenced by different genres, including rock, punk, grunge, and hip hop amongst others. Hopfinger refuses to be categorised or to be pushed in one direction when it comes to labelling his solo and band projects like LeRoy, DAS Hobos, or H. As an advocate for subculture and underground music he tries to combine his gathered knowledge into its own natural composition. His music relies on the interaction of musical know-how and creative elements that he has collected through experiences over the years. “It is difficult to put my music into a genre. I think it is just all the things that accompanied me in all these years and the specific phases of development I have undergone along the way that shapes it.” So what does he keep in his musical drawers?

The folk-dub trio DAS Hobos — Tom Simonetti, Frank Nägele and Leo Hopfinger himself — just released a new single ‘Falsche Hose’ with writer and poet Franz Dobler. Its bold sound creates an atmospheric landscape with a mysterious guitar pattern only releasing tension shortly during the refrain, an ongoing and changing loop-orientated electric guitar, and wiry drum beats. “You could see this more as something cinematic and rather scenic, especially with the German lyrics”, he says. Because this piece was created in collaboration with Franz Dobler the process was a different one. “When working with a writer, who devotes his attention more to the spoken words, the music gets replaceable and enables a relatively broad space of freedom. You try to find a match together.”

Another recent project, a radio play for Bayerischer Rundfunk, called “Thank Bob for Beatnik” portrays the life of US-American beat poet Bob Kaufman, and involved Hopfinger along with other artists like Patti Smith, who read Kaufman’s poems. His contribution was conceptualising background music with Markus und Micha Acher, also known as founding members of Indie-band The Notwist.

Of course, Leo Hopfinger’s music has also been tried to be labelled — his approach has often been described as lo-fi. The core of his creative process seems to be the aim to generate all sounds by himself, this includes incorporating DIY electro bits with field recordings and physical instruments. It depends on the project but it seems safe to say that elements influenced by krautrock, electro, dub, and indie mix into his creations in different intensities. As the Guardian once put it, when introducing his solo project LeRoy as the band of the week in 2015: “We won’t be making a claim, as we are prone to do in this column, for a new act’s potential stardom, but we will argue for their artistic excellence.“

His music is not only for outsiders but for those who are willing to listen carefully and seek individuality and innovation in times of musical homogenisation. Hopfinger finds a way to combine music that might not be linked to each other but without trying to claim authenticity. For him, it seems that music is knowledge waiting to be circulated. “It is interesting to put pieces of puzzles together that do not belong together to overcome clichés.”

Even if it seems that Hopfinger has no crowd-pleasing songs up in his sleeves, this is not entirely true, indeed you can find them but he would not highlight them. He is an artist dedicated to creating meaning and stimulation for discussion rather than complementing what is already there. “Basically you cannot do more than what you actually are”, he concludes.

​

text by Sophie Weissensteiner