Sniffin' The Evidence - 15 Minutes Of Hard Labour -1990- (Cassette, Rat Product), Netherlands

I had a look at what to post on a historical date like today and ended up finding this one. Sniffin' The Evidence was a duo comprised of Etwin van Eedtveld and René Claus from the southern Dutch town of Maastricht. 15 Minutes Of Hard Labour was released privately and I don't know whether anything else was ever done by them later on. Their sound revolves around heavy drum machine patterns, distorted guitars and cut-up fragments of political speeches and such. It can be placed in a longer tradition of experimental music using, abusing or criticizing political themes. A sound that has been put forward a.o. by bands like (late) Cabaret Voltaire or Mark Stewart + The Maffia and Tackhead. It also reminds me of the Dutch band á Suivre that existed years before in Rotterdam.

I left the cassette unindexed because the tracks mostly flow into each other and hard stops would cause too much interruption of the whole.

Kindly donated by the Y Create archive

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Variëté Royal - Same -198X- (Tape, Kino-Tone), Netherlands

I guess it can't get any more obscure than this. I've got no clue who contributed to this or was behind this cassette. I'm not even sure about the name, but it has Variëté Royal written on the insert. The only thing I know is that it comes from the city Maastricht in the complete south of the Netherlands. Kino-Tone was a label that was affiliated to Friet Records, a small independent label which published some punk and post-punk cassettes and singles in the early and mid-eighties. You can find some of those releases over here.

This cassette might have some connection with the VEC-exchange which also hailed from Maastricht, but I'm not sure. You could only obtain those cassettes by means of exchanging your own music on tape for one of the volumes. Then they would put some of your music on the next tape so the cycle would keep going. There is an excellent article over here about that project and you can get them all over here on the official website.

The music on this Kino-Tone tape ranges from processed Casio VL-1 sounds to some proper jamsession song-stuff and electro-acoustic experiments all drenched in a nice portion of surface noise. It's a classic home-taping recording which has some really nice highlights. My personal one is this excerpt below which sounds very close to some total wacky Ptôse like jam. I did not separate the tracks as I felt it was intended as a whole.

Enjoy!