Unovidual & Friends - Vetganzen In Jacquet -1984- (Tape, Stichting Stopcontact), Belgium

Time for another Minimal Synth cassette Jewel(!): Unovidual is the moniker of Belgian (Flemish) electronic music hometaper Henk Wallays. He was (is) part of the Micrart Group (a.o. Linear Movement, Twilight Ritual) and hosted an underground radio show called 'Stalhwerksynfonie' (after Die Krupps) in the early eighties. Wallays soon created the cassette label 3rio with Sandy Nys of Magisch Theater and Dirk Ivens of Absolute Body Control. Also he played in the band Tangible Joy and worked together intensively with US hometaping artist Tara Cross (featured on Minimal Wave's The Lost Tapes etc).

Vetganzen In Jacquet (Penguins in morning-coat jacket) is a very rare cassette that was published on the Dutch Stichting Stopcontact label, which was run by Ruud Kluivers (Doxa Sinistra). The label had legendary releases such as the Contactdisc compilation series and the Tranquil Eyes tape Walks (1985). I did not know there were more cassettes out there on this label, like the one here. I found out the cassette is from 1984 because of this catalogue.

The A-Side of this tape displays quite some dark wonky and occasionally humorous Minimal Synth sounds. It even contains a few songs with Dutch vocals. I do not know whether the pseudonyms (instruments?) written on the cassette cover were actually the collaborating Friends or that those friends are of a conceptual nature (probably he did work together with people). The B-Side starts with a lengthy track called Kankende Doctrines and has much heavier dancefloor potential. The last two songs La Romantise and A Thoughtful End are two amazing Minimal Synth tracks reminding me of acts on the Dutch Trumpett label (André de Koning, Ende Shneafliet), Asmus Tietchens his Sky Records series, but also Enzo Kreft, 5ive Ximes Of Dust, 18:e Oktober and ofcourse Autumn.

Vetganzen In Jacquet is great synth driven wave stuff complete with 808 drums, buzzing synths, home-crafted weirdness, ambient insanity, darkwave moods and more. A pearl from the Belgian 80's Minimal Synth scene everybody seems to be crazy about. What more do you want?

Hopefully someone can help us find Unovidual's other hyperrare cassettes! (Reissue labels?!)

Highly Recommended!

Get it HERE

Palinckx & Palinckx - Maartse Buien -1984- (LP, Traction Avant), Netherlands

Jacques Palinckx (1959, Tilburg) is a Dutch Jazz and Impro guitarist and composer. He played a.o. with Guus Janssen septet, Maarten Altena Ensemble, Beukorkest, Big Bamboozle and improvised with Free-Jazz and improvisation musicians like Fred van de Hove, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn, Christian Marclay, Daan Vandewalle, Peter van Bergen, Keith Rowe, Joseph Bowie, Gerry Hemmingway, Eugene Chadbourne.

During the early eighties the impro outfit Palinckx & Palinckx was established with brother Bert Palinckx (Bass), Frank van Oosterhout (Drums) and Hans Sparla (Trombone). This first album came out on the Dutch Traction Avant label, which was a sublabel of Eksakt Records. It was established to showcase the more serious Modern Composed and Jazz side of the label.

Maartse Buien is a Jazz album indeed, even more so Jazz in a very Dutch manner. Maartse Buien is the Dutch name for the typical Dutch rainfall during the month of March (and April). Because of the bad rainy climate of The Netherlands the rainfall during this period is often accompanied by hail and snow, creating different states of water pouring from the sky unexpectedly. The title track on the album reflects the mood during this period quite well, reminding me a lot of Louis Andriessens's Golven (Waves) soundtrack which is about the Dutch North Sea. It also hints a bit towards music on the Belgian Igloo label. Palinckx was included on this compilation I posted before.

The entire album consists of jazz that transcends into more experimental improvisational stuff, almost creating cinematographic pieces. Some of the pieces are quite beautiful. The improvisation scene of The Netherlands always merges trained classical and jazz music, with distinct Dutch melodies and anarchic improvisation (examples could be: Instant Composers Pool, The Ex, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Nine Tobs, Willem Breuker etc etc).

Although March is not here yet... it will come in a blink of an eye. We are bracing ourselves here in Holland!

Get it HERE

Peter Roos - Klimax -1983- (LP, Private Pressing), Sweden

This is a very obscure self-made minimal synth wave record from one Peter Roos from Sweden. He published this record of which the cover is hand-made out of cardboard in very small quantities. Some information written by Peter Roos I found on Discogs:

Hi, the thing is that I ordered 500 vinyls. only around 150 copies came out to market. Every single sleeve is handmade..most by me, but also my girlfriend and another friend at the time. Think we managed around 200. So I still have some left. In the late 90´s I threw away many(just the record)´cause no interest at all in many years and needed some space. Lately there has been some interest and have also given away to charity. Kind regards. Peter Roos. 

This record has a very distinct "home-made" solo-project feeling to it. Some of the songs are quite experimental whilst others are a bit poppy. It does have something contemporary to it as well. Most songs have vocals in Swedish. It reminds me a bit of the Venezuelan private wave record by Vinicio Adames that I posted some time ago. I think that the drumcomputer used on Klimax has to be a Soundmaster SR-88, one of the greatest and most primitive drum machines from the early eighties (also used by The Actor for example).

Peter Roos made one other self-released album in 1984. His primitive electronic music can be placed within the Swedish DIY scene of the eighties next to Njurmännen, 18:e Oktober, Porno Pop Moon Family, Konduktör Records bands etc. It's just not as dark as many of those acts. Nevertheless a great album!

Get it HERE

A decade of deviance: an ode to MUTANT SOUNDS

Hello all welcome to my blog that i was forced to do after "thrown away" from LOST IN TIME blog....This things happen ....You will find here all my posts from LOST in TIME ,along with many new ones.The blog is dedicated to the obscure ,unknown and underrated musiK.Here we gooo....

That's how it started exactly 10 years ago. I remember the Lost in Tyme blog vividly. Apparently Jim  Mutantsounds was kicked out of this mainly soft psychedelic oriented blog which was being run by a variety of people.  Maybe Jim’s music taste was too unorthodox. He decided to start an own blog, called MUTANT SOUNDS, which caused a revolution.  

Somewhere in 2007 when I was 16 years old I was starting to become really familiar with underground and deviant music of all sorts. Aside from growing up quite in the middle of alternative music, Dutch squats, old Hungarian anti-establishment freaks, a record collecting dad (who also worked in Staalplaat), industrial culture heavyweights, a close relation to the early techno of Bunker records, I ofcourse needed my own initiation with all of this weird stuff. As a child I had seen many concerts because of my young parents that would always take me everywhere. Also during the nineties many CD’s of labels like Warp, Ninja Tune etc etc entered the house. Jazz had always been there, as well as Eastern European jazz rock. Trip-hop, the lounge scene and the rediscovery of Italian library music made its impact around the change of the millennium. After seeing the original 1969 Stooges in 2006 at the Sziget Festival in Budapest and the riots that broke out, I asked my dad what other music was in line with something like that: I got MC5, The Monks and Spacemen 3. A few years earlier my mother had died very young and unexpectedly so I was living with my dad and his record collection since I was 14. The bands he told me of were amazing. I was looking for new meaning in life that surpassed the daily routines and entertainment, because my concerns were often somewhere else than my high school peers. I started to look for 60’s garage punk music on strange forums. Back when they still had codes and passwords of the forum when you downloaded the album. 

Later on my musical taste evolved and the cold eighties started to make a big impact. Besides Joy Division, New Order, Soft Cell, Fad Gadget the link was soon established with Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Coil, Psychic Tv, Laibach, Death In June. You name it. Also the Dutch psychedelic anti-establishment movements of Provo and other kinds of international hippies were important. I started listening to Gong and  Zappa next to Bauhaus and Tuxedomoon so to speak. More importantly all this stuff was already on the shelves at home. The whole occult side of music seemed appealing since my Father prohibited me to get involved in Crowley, because of people in the eighties losing themselves in suicidal adventures. Soon I started a band with my close friends which resembled a bit old F/i, old Cabaret Voltaire and relied heavily on a Spacemen 3 and Stereolab sound. All recorded at home on cassettes within the realm of a few square meters. Later I started my Formatory Apparatus project out of love for analog synths, minimal synth music and Gurdjieff. Anyway, simultaneously I was finding out more and more about strange groups and DIY cassettes searching the web for inspiration. Then it occurred to me that many crazily obscure bands were all in my father’s record collection and that during the years they kept popping up on this music blog called Mutant Sounds.

In the beginning it was the time of Rapidshare.de and the long hours of waiting after you downloaded  just one file. I started to see the whole interconnected spiderweb of bands that were so obscure or nationally underground that it was almost impossible in pre-internet times to know about all of them. Different continents, different political regimes… etc. Together with other blogs Mutant Sounds alo uncovered many artists of the legendary Nurse With Wound list. Basically the base for everything avant-garde, art-prog, krautrock, modern composed, weird, cult and incredible, plus yes, long before internet. Unbelievable. The consistency of Mutant Sounds was mindblowing and the uploads came about with such a rapid speed that it was hard to keep up. At a certain point I started to download everything which became a day job after coming home from school (not to mention from all the other blogs).

Later in the existence of the blog Eric Lumbleau of the great odd Vas Deferens Organization became part of the blog who eventually was the one keeping Mutant Sounds alive for its last years. The Rock In Opposition and NDW style bands on the blog exploded and new perspectives came to the fore when the blog collided European with North-American uploaders. The blog was mind-boggling and Eric’s review writing made it even better. Mutant Sounds’ musical synaesthesia was somewhere in-between a drug cocktail and watching The Holy Mountain, Planete Sauvage, Liquid Sky and Sweet Movie at the same time. So much stuff from all over the world was compressed on the blog and finally got its deserved attention. Finally due to the format of the blog, music history could be altered and forgotten artists got their recognition. There is so much content on the blog that it’s hard to start anywhere discussing it in dept. 

Nowadays so much music that was initially posted on Mutant Sounds is reissued or will be reissued. Many labels know that they found the music there. Fortunately these labels made the second step and actually tracked down the artists to bring back this music. The blog can still be used as one of the most extensive archives of avant-garde, prog, post-punk, rock in opposition, NDW, psychedelic, modern composed, minimal synth, zeuhl, noise, industrial etc. music .

I didn’t mention that it was also kind of prohibited to talk about the blog. I remember that people did not share the website so much because of its hermetic knowledge haha. The same happened at first when I moved to Berlin right after high school and got to know friends in the Sucked Orange gallery I was part of. Later Mutant Sounds became part of our ethic and our religion, but that’s another long story! ;)

I usually don’t like to talk so much about myself in a time in which everybody wants to prevail. I wrote this today as fast as I could in a super raw manner, because it’s the exact 10 year anniversary. It’s not a piece trying to tell how blogs changed music or how cool I am and it’s not well written! It’s a personal take on Mutant Sounds. It had to be written!

Thank you Jim and Eric (plus VDO) for running a blog that changed my life and many life’s forever. Thanks in the name of so many of my friends scattered around the world that owe much of the knowledge to the blog. Thanks for the basic purple lay out and thanks for turning me onto so many amazing artists (for example Nine Circles, Catherine Ribeiro, ADN’ Ckrystall, Igor Wakhevitch, Stratis etc etc). Also hope that you guys are doing well in your personal life! Thank you for the inspiration to start an own blog! (as well as No Longer Forgotten music, but that will be another story too). I had to continue marginally when the heavyweight blogs stopped.

Mutant Sounds forever! Check out the Mutant Sounds radio show on Dublab which still exists! 

http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.com/

Bence – Archaic Mutant Inventions. 

Another article I wrote on the importance of blogs: http://occii.org/knik/nl/filing-the-underground/

Simon Vinkenoog - Liefhebben, Zien en Proeven (Poezie en Muziek) -1966- (LP, Sigma Relax), Netherlands

             Merry Christmas and an Archaic New Year to all followers and friends of the blog! 

This record (which is rare as hen's teeth) is one of the most important documents of the Dutch countercultural psychedelic movement of the sixties. 

Simon Vinkenoog (18 July 1928 – 12 July 2009) was a Dutch author, poet, elocutionist and pioneer of the psychedelic revolution of the last century. He published his first poems around 1950 and kept working his way into the Dutch literary world from the fifties on. In 1959 he willingly tried LSD under medical supervision and later became a protagonist in the world of mind-altering substances, Dutch literature, happenings, free music and advocated for a world in which people lived in astonishment of the universe we belong to and the richness of culture and nature on planet earth. Because his early involvement in the counter culture combined with his literary career, Simon Vinkenoog can be seen as a European example of the Beat Generation. In 1966 he hosted an iconic poetry manifestation in the Royal theatre Carré showcasing a new generation of fresh poets in the Netherlands. If you understand German, check Simon Vinkenoog out in this panel on LSD and Gegenkultur in Europe in the sixties.

William S. Burroughs with Simon Vinkenoog

In 1968 Vinkenoog took part in the making of the mythical album Woorden (words) together with two other Dutch poets where free form music was combined with poetry. The album was only distributed through literary book stores and the first ´coffeeshops´ of Amsterdam, back when those places where not yet polluted with mass tourism and irresponsible behaviour. In that time Amsterdam was an important international centre of free-thinkers, alternative gatherers and hippies comparable to San Francisco in the US. It's ironic that Amsterdam is often perceived as a freedom city because of the endeavours of sixties and seventies and that now almost nothing relates to those values anymore. The Woorden record is seen by many as one of the most striking examples of the Dutch hippie-movement and spaced out sixties. Also it's one of the most rare albums on the legendary NWW-List. 

Anyway, this even rarer record here dates from before Woorden. Liefhebben, zien en proeven (meaining: To love, see and taste) is from 1966 and in record collecting circles often regarded as a literary album. But as the back of the record reveals, this is not just spoken word. The album was recorded on the 30th of December 1966 (literally 50 years ago!) in the in Dutch Royal Tropical Insitute and contains sitars, tabla's, gamelan gongs, indonesian flutes, indian bells etc. It's interesting how the interest in cultures and ethnic instruments of these crazy dope smoking youngsters was still regarded within an anthropological frame. The Tropical Institute was probably delighted that young people wanted to explore their colonial possessions and dig into exotic cultures. 

I know most of you will not understand a word from this album, but hopefully you can appreciate it with the given context. The poems are about life, death, rebirth, love, human potential and much much more. One of the poems is about DMT (in 1966 already.. man). I think I saw him one time in my life during a demonstration at the Dam square of Amsterdam on a stage speaking against the ban of magic mushrooms in Netherlands. Vinkenoog did millions of things in his lifetime: he wrote numerous poems, many novels and also frequently wrote on so called 'pseudo-scientific' topics in various magazines. It's important to note that Vinkenoog is not just some hippie-poet, he is ranked amongst all the important writers of the Dutch literature too. 

He made two albums with Spinvis (the Dutch Beck?) in the 00's which were his last musical recordings. In the video below I included scans from a little sixties underground book that Vinkenoog compiled. It was called Moksha, a timebook for the alteration of consciousness and drugs. Simon Vinkenoog, a very inspiring person and icon of the Dutch counter-culture. From the liner notes:

I wish that the human heart would beat faster. I wish that I could tell everyone everything I know at once: how the battle between light and dark is won by the light. I wish that people carried the sun with them. I wish that cheerful light would shine from all houses. I wish so many things, I still want so much: peace, peace, peace. I can't say it differently than with words: I don't want to persuade, convince or entice - I Just want you to listen, so you can find your own answers. Listen. And also stop the record, so you can listen to yourself! Have a good trip!

Get it HERE

Robert Barry - Otherwise -1981- (LP, Van Abbemuseum), US/Netherlands

This record came out for the occassion of an exhibition in the Dutch Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Van Abbemuseum is a museum for modern and contemporary art with quite a special modern art collection for Dutch standards. Robert Barry's conceptual LP came with a booklet written by two former directors of the museum: Rudi Fuchs and Jan Debbaut. From the liner notes:

Robert Barry (1936, New York) belongs to the first generation of 'conceptual' artists, together with a.o. Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Douglas Huebler; starting from a fundamental new art-concept, they changed with their activities around gallery-onwer Seth Siegelaub the international art-world at the end of the sixties drastically. [...] Amongst the conceptual artists who worked more in particular with language, Robert Barry occupies an important position on the borderline of visual art, poetry and philosophy. Conceptual art is - more than formal revolutions in modern art - a fundamental re-thinking of the function of art and the artist in a changing cultural context; it is in the defining of this new attitude towards art that the ideas and works of Barry make an essential contribution. 

Otherwise is a minimalist conceptual art project in which associative words are being recited. The record was also included in the famous book Broken Music (after the Milan Knížák record) gathering artist records in a catalogue overview. I suppose that you can also just use this record if you have trouble falling asleep. Just put it on, listen and drift away. Scans of the booklet are included (Dutch and English).

Get it HERE

Frits Maats & Nico van der Sman - Beweging -1982- (Tape), Netherlands

Quite some noise this post: Dutch artists Frits Maats & Nico van der Sman made this cassette called Movement (Beweging) which was actually an art project created in the Dutch village of Roden. The sounds you hear were recorded in a milk factory which was later dismantled. Then the sounds were played again in the empty factory and recorded which resulted in this tape. You can hear quite obviously that something conceptual is going on.

Frits Maats is an artist that explores the relation between fine arts and media, but also sculpture and music. He made a lot of video art during the eighties and also collaborated with Brian Eno. He is co-founder of the Amsterdam based interdisciplinary art and research centre Mediamatic. Mediamatic is a cultural institution dedicated to new developments in the arts since 1983. They organize lectures, workshops and art projects, focusing on nature, biotechnology and BioArt in a strong international network.

Get it HERE