Maybe the Devil is real. Maybe it was imagined through a mixture of folklore, local politics, and whispers – maybe it’s both. By the time Daniel Leeds – a former Quaker turned practitioner of magicks, a staunch monarchist in a New Jersey with no love for the British Crown, and a dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast – died in 1720, he had left behind an esoteric astrological almanac, a pugilistic reputation, and a son, Titan. The American Almanack was concerned with both the natural and supernatural: angels and demons rendered real through sheer force of belief. Titan inherited the duty of publishing this annual record and proceeded to stamp it with the family crest: an image of a wyvern, a creature not dissimilar to a small dragon. This bore a striking resemblance to the Jersey Devil, a horned cryptid whose mythology would come to haunt New Jersey for centuries to come with stories of civilians terrorised, farms raided, and livestock slaughtered. 

On a balmy summer evening, Brian Leeds, who is fifteen generations and three centuries removed from Daniel, is thinking about genealogy. “The Jersey Devil is my family,” he says, smiling. Some local legends trace the Jersey Devil’s legend to a child born into the Leeds family who, moments into its life, sprouted wings, flew up the chimney, and disappeared into the Pine Barrens, a forested area that covers over one-fifth of New Jersey and houses ample material for cryptozoologists to investigate to this day. “I wouldn’t mind being out there,” he says. “We’re kin, so I think he would leave me alone.” 

In conversation, Leeds – who, as Huerco S., Loidis, Pendant, autobouncer620, and a half-dozen other aliases, has explored countless corners of electronic music – is eminently unassuming, disarmingly laid-back, and quick to crack a joke in between sips of his Paulaner Pils. But, somewhere in his blood, there’s a drop of the unknowable.

Maybe that explains his comfort with shapeshifting. In 2013, Leeds released ‘Colonial Patterns’, his first LP as Huerco S., presenting a blown-out vision of house music, one where static and digital fuzz threatened to overtake the beats underneath. Three years later, he followed it up with ‘For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)’, an audaciously titled ambient record packed with cragged synthesisers and a bleary-eyed – if precarious – sense of calm. With 2022’s ‘Plonk’, the now Philadelphia resident shifted gears yet again, braiding the sounds of drill, trap, ambient techno, and dubbed-out electronics into some kind of minimalistic machine-music. If there is a throughline to Leeds’ work, it’s this mutability: a continuous push towards the unknown and unexplored.