Hanzom Music has never failed providing us fresh bangers of super talented newcomers of the scene, such as music from Notequal, Finalfix or Omneum, however, this time I am introducing you someone called Nebulate, if you haven’t heard of him yet. Nebulate, aka Truls Stritzel just released a crazy hot EP titled ‘Doomsday’ on Hanzom, featuring four originals, two of them being collars with Osyrus and I got him down for a little interview to get proper insight into this project.

First of all, could you give us an introduction of yourself? Where are you from, what is your musical background?

Hi, I am Truls, born in Germany in Aachen in 1996, but I grew up in the Netherlands. Right now I live in Maastricht. My musical background started when I was seven, when I started taking piano lessons. Turned out I was very decent with that, so I started pursuing this intensively, I had ambition to study at the conservatory and followed pre-educational classes at that conservatory to prepare me for that.

In the end however, I decided against studying solo piano and I studied music in education. So now I’m a music teacher. During those studies, I also became fluent in many other instruments, such as drums, guitar or bass guitar. Right now, I’m learning violin.

What is the essence of your identity as Nebulate and where do you draw inspiration from to this project?

Honestly, my identity as Nebulate still feels like a journey where I’m just as much along for the ride as you are. Also, I don’t think there is a finite answer for it. My taste and influences will be different at different periods in my life. At the very start, one of my main inspirations was slowly evolving melodic techno. At some point, I felt like I couldn’t fully express my dnb music with that sound pallet and ideology, so I shifted my sound design and interest. Right now, I’m drawing some inspiration from jump up. But in the future, I can see that my interest will shift again, and I will draw my inspiration from other sources. We just keep evolving and growing.

One thing I want to mention regarding inspiration for projects, is little creative compositions. Every now and then, I meet with a friend, and we give each other a little task to produce. A little prompt, a story to recreate sonically. For example: I once got the task to write a musical story about Hades. In that story, Hades was appointed by Zeus as God of the underworld. In my piece of music, I had to attempt to answer the question whether Hades was okay with that. Also I had to start my piece with the note D flat. This rewired my brain how to make music completely, and it made me realise a few things. Working conceptually with a story makes it so much easier to conceptually ‘design’ a tune. Songwriting becomes an integral part and gives the tune a clear direction. It makes some creative choices easier and finishing tunes also becomes easier. 

Let’s talk about your latest release. Doomsday EP just came out on the 20th of September on Hanzom Music, and what a release if I may add! The four track EP features two solo tracks and two collaborations with Osyrus, could you elaborate on the solo tracks first?

Thank you! I’m glad you like them! ‘Desolate land’ is the oldest of the bunch. In that tune I wanted to retry implementing some techno mentality in a DnB environment. Techno is a lot more long-term with ideas and sounds. It takes more than just 1 phrase to fully introduce a musical idea or a sound. Sometimes just a single sound is added after 16 bars, whilst the rest stays the same over those 16 bars.Might seem boring to some, but to others this makes it much more engaging, since it’s easy to follow, easy to get sucked into the story of the tune, and much more exciting when a single sound is added. ‘Desolate land’ is built with same idea. I decided to make it not super extreme. So, every 16 bars a single sound is added (in the drop), which ultimately makes up the full call & response riff, which is common in techno. In drop 2, I decided to elaborate on the techno sound aesthetic with the addition of an acid-ish synth.

For ‘Renaissance‘, I don’t want to tell all too much actually. On the 30th of November this year, I will host a masterclass in Sittard (NL) at ‘Vlaai en Bass‘ , a networking slash masterclasses event. (Tickets available), where I’ll do a track breakdown for this tune.What I can say however, this tune only exists because of a creative composition task ,that I mentioned that concept earlier.The prompt was conceptually simple: create a song only using stock plugins (drum samples or fx samples like sweeps and impacts were allowed). Everything else had to be synthesized. I usually work with stock plugins mostly, but it was a nice challenge to leave out the few things I use from 3rd parties.

How did you start working on the EP, what is the concept behind it? 

There is a concept, but to be honest, the tunes were not made to fit that concept. I picked 4 tunes that fit together sonically, not conceptually, and sent them to Rene (Hanzom boss). If I had known from the get-go that those 4 tunes would be an EP at some point, I would have thought of a concept straight away, and made some songwriting/sound design choices differently.

When we decided to release those 4 together, I tried to somehow create a story with the characters of the songs. From epic and monumental (‘Doomsday’) and chaotic/twisted (‘The flood’) to something more minimal (‘Desolate land’) and finishing with something energetic and slightly hopeful (‘Renaissance’). I tried to create a narrative. In the end it worked out perfectly thankfully.

I delivered a rough narrative and the writers at Hanzom HQ added the flavors of the story taking place in ancient Egypt, involving figures like Osiris and Seth. After some research on their end into Egyptian mythology the full story was crafted. Looking at the tunes and the story now, it still fits perfectly, even though the tunes were not crafted to fit the theme. So I’m still very happy how everything turned out. It makes it a much more complete product with the backstory.

What was the biggest challenge for you to come over for this release? 

Since they are four individual tunes, the challenges were individual for each tune as well. So it’s hard to say that there was one big challenge.For ‘Doomsday’ we were struggling hard with a second drop and the direction to take it. But at some point we just sat there, I started fiddling around with a cool plugin for the amen break (DB-Force the amen) and we started cooking. As soon as our idea for that drop was clear (the constant 4×4 vibe), the remainder of the second drop went quite easily.

For ‘The flood‘ the main challenge was the mixdown. It was one of those where the mixdown needed a lot of tweaking and shaving.

Main challenge for ‘Desolate land’ was actually finishing the tune hahaha. It was the oldest one, so I was quite detached from the ideas I had when I started it a while ago. But when I remembered the concept, it went quite alright.

‘Renaissance’ posed no challenges actually. It was one of those tunes that wrote themselves. Flow state was strong with this one.

Which is your personal favourite of the EP and why? – Mine is definitely Renaissance!

Hahaha, yeah it seems to be a fav for most people. I also enjoy it a lot because it came out so easily. All tunes have their things that I enjoy of course (otherwise I wouldn’t release it). I think, however, that ‘Doomsday’ is my fav. The collaboration in this one with Osyrus went super nicely, and it is a really nice blend of our sounds. Also, 2^nd drop gang in this tune is strong hahaha. I really like the flow of second drop. We had lots of fun crafting that.

How did the collaborations come about? Did you work together in the same space or was it an online collaboration?

We first met at a Nox event in Eindhoven, back in March 2022. He lost his phone, he gave me his number so I could call him for him to find his phone. That didn’t work , he found it another way though. We figured, now that we exchanged contacts and both are producers, we should just meet up and try work together. We tried a few times, where we physically met, started something together and then continued online through discord, or just bouncing stems back and forth. Nothing really worked, so we tried something else.We pinned a date, and both had to bring a 16 bar loop to further work on. One of those loops turned out to be ‘The flood’, the other one is a dub forever. We tried this again at a later moment in time, and ‘Doomsday’ was born. Continued work was a mix of discord sessions or working on stems alone.

How do you find working with other artists in general?

The thing I dislike about collaborations is that I must creatively deliver at that moment when you are together. And somehow that doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes, however, I get super ignited and “megasparked” by other ideas, I enter flow state and rattle off. It’s really hit or miss. Sending back and forth stems works nicely of course. I have more time to enter the project when I have an idea or want to work on some mixdown things. But collaborating that way at the same time is less favourable to me, since you are not actually working together with someone else, and not really learn/get ideas and ignite each other, which seems to be the point of collaboration. Physically or through discord is for sure my fav way to collaborate. Danger of this if things don’t work out is to give up on working together. One day nobody gets something done, another day you create the craziest banger together. You should at least try a few times if you want to collaborate.

Now let’s talk about the future of Nebulate. What is the following club season holding for us, any big shows? 

I’m playing a special set in Eindhoven on the 25^th of October. An XXL event with 3 stages by Avian Bass collective from Tilburg. I think I would consider myself as a neurofunk artist. When I play sets, that’s what I play, along with other techy good stuff that hits hard.However, the 25^th, I will play an exclusive special jump up only set. That will be great fun.

On the twenty-third of November, I’m playing in my hometown, Maastricht at Landbouwbelang. Elaborating on the whole jump up vibe, Majistrate will be headlining the night and I’ll play B2B with Minzo. Good friend and he also really pushed to get Jump up on the map here in the south of NL with his own event Amplified. The event is a collab of Amplified with Bass in ya Face.

What is your goal as an artist?

For now, this is all a pretty substantial hobby for me. I’m not trying to live off this. But I always had certain goals and ambitions. Actually, most of those goals have been ticked off. Doesn’t mean I’m stopping anytime soon, it only means that I’m super happy with how my project is going and where it’s heading. The thing I would love to see for my project, is more bookings throughout Europe. I’d love to visit different places, meet new people and share my music with people from all around Europe.

Any further releases on the radar from you?

I’m currently writing a lot of new stuff, but there’s still some tunes coming out that are already done and ready to go out. First one to come will be in December this year. It’s a collab with a really sick producer who has a thing for a certain number. It will be released on a really dope label that starts with the same letter as the name of the producer. In January 2025, I’ll start off with a freebie, and in April I’ll drop two more tunes on another label that’s also really sick! By the time April arrives, a lot of new exciting projects can be released. I’m not stopping anytime soon 🙂

And a fun question to finish it off, if you had to pick any artist to collab with, who would it be?

Of course you want to collab with the biggest name you can think of, but collabing with friends can be the most fun. Even if the tunes don’t come out the coolest, you can still just have a blast and create cool shit together.That being said, Current Value or Mefjus.

It was a lot of fun having this little chat to Nebulate, learning about his music writing procedures, the countdown to his future releases is now real. You can keep updated on his work by following him on instagram @nebulate_music and checking out his linktree here.