[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The list of Belgium’s gifts to the world is long: the compact cassette, half-decent chocolate and Plastic Bertrand; as well as roller skates, pommes frites and Els Pyloo.
The low country’s musical talents have been prodigious, and a key to its reputation is the success of Front 242. Dressed in hockey equipment and sunglasses, the unit dominated dancefloors in the 1980s with tributes to Mohammar Qaddafi and strange Arctic sunrises. Their name might sound like a Baader-Meinhof side project, but the original headhunters made their impact through beats, not bombs.
The Front’s front man is Jean-Luc de Meyer. He has had several side projects alongside his main band’s releases, including C-Tec and 32CRASH. The latest, Lederman de Meyer, finds him joining forces with another Belgian prodigy, Jean-Marc Lederman of The Weathermen, Kid Montana and Ghost & Writer.
Lederman is an electronic original. He started making music in 1977, joining Digital Dance and becoming part of Fad Gadget’s original band at a time when synthesizers were still a novelty. As well as making danceable and chillable music in a range of styles, he has worked in new media and gaming. An app he made with Karl Bartos, Kraftwerk’s secret weapon, is still good fun years after it was released to raise money for victims of the tsumani in Japan.
The result of their pairing is an album. Eleven Grinding Songs matches de Meyer’s iconic growling vocals with Lederman’s synthetic instrumentation in a timely collection. It avoids the potholes of Brussels’ roads and industrial cliches; nodding to the dancefloor while providing a soundtrack for nights spent contemplating the end of the world.
Certainly, the first of the songs they worked on together – a cover of Fad Gadget’s “Back to Nature” – has an apocalyptic air. Frank Tovey’s eco-friendly love song is set in a dystopian future that seems more present every day. Lederman de Meyer’s take crunches beats and coats the iconic bass line with a heavy layer of grunge.
Lederman was recruited for the first Fad Gadget band by Daniel Miller, who had his eye out for some synthesizer players to back Tovey. Having finished with Digital Dance in Belgium, Lederman rang the Mute man in London,
I had met Daniel a few months earlier. I called him and said, ”Do you know somebody looking for a musician?” I wanted to go to the UK, which in 1980 was the place to be because the music scene was so exciting. And he said yes, so I played with Frank for a few months and played on two tracks on the first album [Fireside Favourites].
Lederman recalls Tovey as shy off-stage and a different person behind the microphone:
Meeting him and playing with him was very fun, because he had lots of humour and was a great guy. His ideas about music were very original, and I still have very strong feelings and memories about it.
I remember him being very, very funny but also incredibly tense. He was very intense about his music – very sure of what he wanted to do.
He was one of the most amazing showmen ever. When I was playing with him, I was on stage thinking, he is like Iggy Pop with synthesizers!
Despite being an icon of synth music, Tovey shifted away from electronics in his later career; however, he never gave up on his radical, humanist message.
He was very socially conscious, and he didn’t want people to be focussing on one side of things – and with synth music, the crowd tended to focus on that. I think that taking the acoustic guitar and being acoustic moved the people into what he was saying more than when he was shaving [his body on stage]. That is why he changed direction, but his later music was very special.
Making the track was also a reconnection with de Meyer, with whom Lederman had close contact as Front 242’s office manager:
I learned a lot about business and a lot about Front – what success can bring you and what it can’t. Also on the commercial side, because Front was very successful and had just been signed in the USA, so money was floating around. At that time, nobody would say anything against us – no remixer, except William Orbit, would refuse to do something. It was very interesting for me as a person to see those kinds of things.
The album opener, “Atoms in Fury,” is a growling track that prowls like a great cat. De Meyer’s in strong form, and the song is as noir as a pool of blood in an empty room lit by the headlights of unseeing traffic.
In “Flowers and Birds,” the duo come closer to a style that Covenant fans will appreciate – de Meyer’s vocals are evocative of Eskil Simonsson’s, while brass sounds and crisp drum effects underpin what is a minor-key delight.
The pace picks up with “I Wish We Could I Hope We Will.” This is the most obvious candidate for a single release: Lederman’s rhythms driving forwards with energy beneath de Meyer’s crushed gravel vocals.
That song came from Jean-Luc saying, why don’t we try something krautrock – with this kind of drumming. We settled on that motorik kind of beat and just went for it.
The duo have included an excellent, minimal version of Wire’s “Heartbeat,” in which de Meyer intones Bruce Gilbert’s words with clinical precision. His vocals hover over textures spun by Lederman’s machinery before crashing drums drive the song through the middle section.
This isn’t more EBM-by-numbers. The album is more complex and sophisticated than most current efforts, and it wears its influences well. As Lederman explains:
It is exactly the counter-ethic from New Beat. When I realised that I hated making music for making money, I began doing music only for me and the people around me. What I want is to have a record release that I can listen to years later, because I never listen to them once I have finished creating them, and be able to think – that was good, yeah, and I hope that some people realise that.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
You’d have to go a long way to find a singer classier than Dubstar‘s Sarah Blackwood. Or one who is as capable of summoning the minor key feelings of love in an English town.
Henrik Wittgren, the promoter and Lejonhjärta keyboard player, celebrates his 40th birthday by throwing a party for the Swedish alternative music scene.
Illness kept brother and founding member Stephen Huss from staying in Europe, but Darrin soldiered on with musicians recruited from the local scene. Today, he works with Stefan Rabura, who keeps up with dynamic set lists as Huss ad libs and shows off a vocal strength to rival Shirley Bassey.
It is reported that a new kind of material has been developed by British researchers, which can absorb 99.5% of visible light. Commercial applications for Vantablack must surely include stage design for Covenant, Sweden’s biggest EBM export.
The show opens with “Death of Identity” from the Psychonaut EP, setting an experimental tone. What follows is a tour through Covenant’s back catalogue, drawing in early compositions like ”Edge of Dawn” and ”Shelter” from 1994’s Dreams of a Cryotank.
For their debut London show, UUUU take up a diamond formation. Graham Lewis, the Anglo-Swedish bassist, takes the striker’s position. He is flanked by Matt Simms on guitar and singing bowls and Thighpaulsandra on keyboards and percussion. Drummer Valentina Ma from Italy brings up the rear and the show kicks off before an excited crowd.
Thighpaulsandra’s keyboards run up the right side of the stage, the bass passing between him and Lewis. He fills the gaps with confident movements that show off his international experience.
By the summer of 1983, when You and Me Both came out, Mute was on the cutting edge of electronic and experimental music. Founded at the end of 1978, Mute was originally just a name for Daniel Miller to release his single, “TVOD/Warm Leatherette.” The DIY punk ethic had seen many bands put out their own 7″ singles, and as The Normal he wanted to make punk with a Korg 700s synthesizer.
Lau Nau lives on a Finnish island that is shared with only a handful of people. The sea and the sky dominate the environment, and between them the inhabitants share their rock with trees and the wind. The summer days are long, but winter’s veil lifts only to reveal a grayness that soon fades.
The first time the Revolting Cocks played in London, it was a debauched, riotous affair. Led by “Uncle” Al Jourgensen, the electro-industrial supergroup hoovered up enormous quantities of pharmaceuticals ahead of the show. They appeared with drugged-up strippers, who danced precariously and mimed sex acts with band members. The audience was whipped into a frenzy by the band’s taught, funky grooves and the chaos unfurling before them. The front of the stage was the wrong place to be for anyone who wore glasses.
Album performances are rarely good ideas, because most albums are short on quality material. That isn’t the case with RevCo. Written by talents from the industrial and electronic music scenes, who were locked up with samplers and 1970s movies, every track on Big Sexy Land is solid entertainment. Rhythms were carefully worked out, rather than being slapped down as 4/4 bass kicks. Bass lines were introduced that corrupted funk’s stylings. Vocals were subverted with sampled quotes. Live, the material works as well as it did in the studio.
For the final episode, proceedings opened with a group of pop artists. The first day of the festival is a warm-up for the weekend’s proceedings, so it is a relaxed affair. Music fans reconnect, compare notes on the coming events and enjoy shows with a poptronica flair.
