At night in New York, Wavewulf builds worlds out of voltage and digital wavelengths. His story begins in northwest Arkansas, where Nicholas Long grew up among his father’s guitars and the hum of Passing Note Studio. A Depeche Mode concert in 1991 flipped the switch, sending him home with a Roland Juno 106 that became his permanent obsession. From then on, he spoke in oscillators and filters, carrying the studio’s name forward after his father’s death as a gesture of memory and continuity.
College bands gave him room to sharpen his craft, recording on a Tascam 4‑track, layering MIDI and sequencers, sketching out the blueprint of the artist he would become. Life carried him through Boston and New York, where he worked before turning to graduate studies in history and library science. His thesis on Kraftwerk and post‑war German pop revealed that his fascination with electronic sound had always been more than casual.
In 2015, he married Katarina, returned to New York the following year, and soon after founded Wavewulf. The project was born from grief, his mother’s death echoing the earlier loss of his father, and the inheritance he used to fill a room with analogue synthesisers, drum machines, and recording gear. Out of that room came “Oscillation” in 2019, a debut carved in voltage and memory.
From there, the catalogue unfolded like chapters in a restless book. “Green Decay,” with longtime collaborator Christopher John Donato, seethed with political frustration and environmental despair. “Space Art and Angels” lifted listeners into the cosmos, chasing dimensions and the human soul. “The North and the Sea,” released in 2022 on State of Bass Records, mapped Arctic landscapes and freedom, with Nala Spark stepping in as co-writer and vocalist alongside Donato, Bryan Brown, and a global cast of voices.
Wavewulf’s sound grows out of a tangled forest of influences. Depeche Mode gave him the pulse of synths that ache like human voices. Kraftwerk laid down the steel spine of machine rhythm, while Bowie’s Berlin years showed him how reinvention can fracture and rebuild identity in neon. Brian Eno taught him that music can behave like weather, drifting and shifting around the listener. Tangerine Dream stretched the horizon into cinematic expanse, and The Velvet Underground scraped emotion raw until it bled into texture. Slowdive and Cocteau Twins dissolved him into fog and dream, while Aphex Twin dragged him into labyrinths where beats mutate like living organisms. More recent companions such as Röyksopp’s icy warmth, M83’s widescreen nostalgia, and Ulrich Schnauss’ dream haze reminded him and us alike that electronic music is less a genre and more of an alternative medium for composition and sound.
For the album “Unbreakable Soul,” Chase Walker joined along with a roster of vocalists including Nala Spark, LiAura, Monica Young, Veronika Jokel, Emily Fraser (EmmaLay), and Dasha Larks (Pulse Lab). The record leaps from Tangerine Dream‑inspired synthscapes into lush electro-pop atmospheres that pull equally from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. The title track feels beamed in from a cyberpunk alley, its arpeggiated synth lines glowing like neon against rain-slick concrete. “Echo in the Dark” with LiAura threads subtle strands of darkwave, industrial, new age, and even approachable prog metal, all woven so organically that the transitions feel inevitable. The album is Nicholas Long at his most fearless, bending genres until they dissolve into one another, leaving the listener nodding at the audacity and smirking at the precision.
Wavewulf’s story is not a straight line but a current, surging through grief, memory, and invention, always bending toward sound as a way of seeing. His work resists easy categories, moving between circuitry and spirit, between the pulse of machines and the weight of human experience. What we have so far is not just a titillating discotheque of albums but a living archive of resilience, proof that synths can carry emotion and that music, at its most fearless, is a way of surviving the world while remaking it in light.
