daily posts – Page 39 – Enfant Terrible

Skeppet

Today a package from the Not Not Fun label arrived with some excellent new stuff (as mostly is the case with this label)… both for my own pleasure and hopefully yours… as some copies will be up in the webshop soon…

Next to a 12″ by the ever amazing Umberto there was the latest LP by tropical wave / weird pop / psych pop musician Maria Minerva… but the best record in the box was by Skeppet…

Skeppet is a Swedish psychedelic outfit which first came to my attention with the split album they did with Street Drinkers on the now defunct label Release The Bats… this split album is all kinds of awesome… both sides but especially the Skeppet side…

I was really looking forward to more music from this duo and the new album entitled “Phase 3” is simply superb… so the waiting was worth it for sure… Skeppet play a soft, sweet, light sounding, soothing kind of psychedelic music… it is playful and trippy… it sounds a lot like classic 60’s acid rock stuff in many ways… possibly like Country Joe And The Fish in their most psychedelic mood… the music is sunny and would have fitted perfectly in the 60’s hippie scene in the USA… think Haight Ashbury on a nice sunny afternoon… a bit of dozing off in the sun or shade with some drinks or anything else… simply perfect… I am getting in the mood for the first days of spring for sure with Skeppet spinning on the turntable here…

Below is the 8 minute edit of the over 20 minutes piece on the A side of the record… enjoy!

Rockumentaries

From time to time I like to watch documentaries about pop and rock music… in the past I saw a really good one on Nico and more recently there was a very nice one on gabber / hardcore…

This weekend I saw two… one on Dutch band Doe Maar… an 80’s band which played reggae inspired pop music… in a very short period of time they became the biggest thing in Holland… the best thing about this documentary were the very open conversations with the band members reflecting on the past… they pictured the two driving musicians and they themselves told about their difference views on music and the band… it was nice to see how they still got along very well after all these years… without being frustrated or being in a fight as you often hear in such cases…

The other thing was something I never realised… they became very popular with a very young audience… teens and even younger… this frustrated them as they made serious music and were no boy band as we know boy bands today, created especially for such a specific young audience and to make some cash…

The band told this was also the reason they split up… that they did not find that their music reached the people it was meant for and did not come across as intended… funny detail is that I used to listen to this band a lot… when I was very young… when I was about 7 years old…

Another documentary I saw was on Jimi Hendrix… a musician I never liked before… I have never bought any of his music… even though I am a big fan of 60’s music… it never triggered me or made sense to me… the documentary was great with lots of old footage and some friends of him still alive telling about him…

The footage from Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 is legendary and I knew some of the images but never saw it this way before… his performance was amazing… how he played the guitar and how the whole performance was turned into a ritual with as climax setting the guitar on fire and summoning the fire to rise…

And… surprisingly I liked quite a lot of the music of Jimi Hendrix which was featured on the documentary and I will get into this soon to see if I like his work better now as in the past…

Vrystaete

Last year I created the Vrystaete label for sounds I am interested in and that did not fit in the existing series of Enfant Terrible. For a part these sounds it goes back to my long love for traditional music… what one few people know for example is that I dj’ed folk music for quite some time and that I released a compilation cd with contemporary folk music back in 2004 in collaboration with Folkwoods Festival.

For a part I neglected folk music due to the focus on Enfant Terrible… but I have always listened to some folk sounds… especially to the weirder stuff from Fonal, but also to classics as Pentangle and Steeleye Span and to some more modern stuff like Hedningarna, Garmarna and more recently to the darker side of folk by Wardruna…

Vrystaete is not meant to be a “folk label” but I am releasing some folk related sounds on it… like the Niedowierzanie already was and the upcoming Diamantener Oberhof and Brunnen also have some links to folk music in their own ways…

Some people asked me about the name Vrystaete where it comes from and what it means… if you translate it into English it would be “Freestate”… when it concerns my label it means that the label is a freestate (for me) to release adventurous music on… so to speak “free spirited” music… no cliche sounds and not music which is genre and style bound… it is also music for people with an open mind and taste and who like to hear new sounds and are not bound by any subcultural dogma’s… thus simply people who have a true interest in music…

The spelling of Vrystaete relates to the part of Holland where I live and the Vrystaete label is established… in my village are many old estates which were built at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. These estates were from people who lived and worked in Amsterdam and came here in the countryside to stay for the weekend and for hunting for example…

These estates have names spelled in old Dutch which reflected either the family name of the owner or what the estate was used for… so often names related to hunting and leisure time… so when I created the Vrystaete label I took a name which is related to the estates here and which reflects the free state of mind with which the label is done…

Anyway… here is one Diamantener Oberhof song…

And here is one song by Brunnen…

Both tracks are from the upcoming albums… more information and sound previews can be found here…

Gonzo (circus)

Out this week is a new issue of Gonzo (circus)… a quality paper magazine in the Dutch language on music and art… maybe a bit like what The Wire is for English speaking people, Gonzo is for the Dutch speaking people…

The magazine is partly Dutch and partly Belgium and covers a wide range of music and art styles often neglected by other media channels… and from time to time they also publish articles about media culture, the state of the arts and so on… discussing our cultural state of being in general so to speak…

With every issue there is also a free cd called “Mind The Gap” with music featured in the magazine and/or music recently released… and all of this is done by people who do this on a voluntary basis… since 1991… do I need to say more?!

The new issue features among other a very interesting article on Suzanne Ciani and her modular synth music… really worth checking out if you can read Dutch… and the “Mind The Gap” cd features this time an Embers and an Kit n C.l.a.w.s. track from the recently released vinyls on Enfant Terrible and Gooiland Elektro…

But there is much more to discover in the 100 pages of the magazine the 11 tracks on the cd…

Oh… and I hope I do not need to explain where the name of the magazine comes from… but if you do not know please do a little search on the internet and there is even more to discover for you…

Goo morning

Every morning before going to my job I have about time for one side of a record… often resulting that I play side A from a certain record one morning and the the next morning I continue with the B side… anyway last year the most played record in the morning was Sonic Youth’s “Goo”… an album from 1990 I totally rediscovered last year…

In the past I listened to a lot of Sonic Youth… then for some years a lot less and since two years or so I play their music again quite often… in the past I liked “Confusion Is Sex”, “Sister” and “Dirty” the best… “Goo” never really was among my favorites… maybe as it is a sort of in-between record… in a way it combines the sound of “Daydream Nation”… dreamlike sequences bordering melancholy melodies and noise eruptions… and on the other hand the song based tracks like on “Dirty”… or maybe this is all nonsense as the band has on many album (including “Dirty”) played around with noise, song structures and melodic movements…

“Goo” anyway made a lot of sense to me last year and I played it so many mornings… sometimes the A side and sometimes the B side… but mostly the A side… And… you need to love the cover… also if you do not like Pop art… Also this record is a good starting point of picking up my renewed interest in Sonic Youth… I stopped following them after “Experimental Jet-Set, Trash And No Star “… so let’s see what is there to explore…

Radio Resistencia

Lunchtime at my day job… so a few words on Radio Resistencia, the monthly radio show I have been involved with for some years now…

Tonight from 22.00 hour to 01.00 hour (CET) Radio Resistencia will be on for a three hour show at Intergalactic FM on IFM1. This episode features dj M., dj Alacidus and dj Sololust. I will be opening the show with a set of dark and moody music ranging from Kobosil to Burzum and from Oake to December…

Radio Resistencia first started when I met with Andy Dufter (known from Lesbian Mouseclicks and Staatseinde) and Sololust. Not too long after this dj Alacidus became our second resident dj (next to me) and our frequent collaborator is nobody less as Former Descent/Neurobit/Rioteer… both for live performances as well as dj sets…

We started in Utrecht in a wharf at the canal in the city centre before moving around a bit… also from time to time we do shows somewhere else or record an Enfant Terrible event as an episode of Radio Resistencia… like in Berlin in June 2014 (see the video below this post)…

Starting from December 2015 onwards we are located back in Utrecht at projectspace/artist workplace and more Kapitaal… at this place also Vrystaete and Petit Enfant (coming back in 2015!) sleeves/packaging is printed by hand…

From January onwards the radio shows are presented as mini events where a small audience is welcome… this can be regular shows but also release parties for ET releases or something yet undefined… these events take place on sunday afternoons starting mostly at 15.00 hour and ending around 18.00 hour… there are locals beers to drink and often nice concerts but always music you do not hear anywhere else! Check the events page for what is coming/going on…

Tune in and enjoy! If you missed an episode or want to listen to them on demand you can find all shows in the archive. And… here is what we did in Berlin last June (2014) and became Episode 44…