fonal – Enfant Terrible

Lend Me Your Underbelly

Since some years a part of my focus for Enfant Terrible is on contemporary Dutch music… the true starting point of this was of course the “Kamp Holland” 2LP compilation… and ever since then I am on the look out for more interesting new stuff from my own country which also fits my musical taste and styles for ET…

Recently I came across Lend Me Your Underbelly… a project from Utrecht… the city I started Enfant Terrible and I lived for a long time… Lend Me Your Underbelly is a true DIY project… releasing his own music on his own label Epigenetic Records… a second album is on its way but for now there is a 7″ and a 2LP… both dating from 2013…

The 2LP “Giant Tadpoles Among Us” is a must have for fans of lo-fi psychedelic pop music… if you like stuff from Fonal, Morc and Vrystaete this is for you… the music is mostly based on guitar tunes added with electronics… in a way the recordings sound like rehearsal recordings… but I mean this in a positive way… the intimate sound and feeling of these recordings make up for a super nice listening experience…

And for the locals… Lend Me Your Underbelly will perform live at Radio Resistencia on the 17th of May… for now you can order the album here… and here is my absolute favourite piece form the album…

Etch Wear / Psykopharmaka

Etch Wear is the label run by my friend from Europ Europ… since 1994 the world is not safe from his incidental actions… always fresh and surprising and never fitting into speficic genre styles or trends or whatever… 1994… that is a long time… 10 years longer even as my own label…

Some of the recent highlights for me are the vinyls by Epilektrician and Fräulein Luftwaffe… and very recently there came out a 3″ cd-r (one of my favourite formats ever) by Psykopharmaka… they released a tape on Etch Wear in 1994 and were the reason to start the label… now twenty years later a 3″ cd-r is released with an amazing over 20 minutes version of the track released twenty years ago… starting out as a lo-fi electronic ambient track but after about 7 and a half minute an bass guitar kicks in… resulting in strange and weird music/muzak… like in-between Fonal stuff and Lynch like dark jazz and ambient… simply amazing…

As second track a new version of the original track is added… sounding somewhere in-between Einstürzende Neubauten and Tuxedo Moon… what else do you need?!

Here is another piece by Psykopharmaka… sit back and enjoy the trip…

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…