music stories

Many years ago, whenever I was in Amsterdam, I popped into the tiny cellar where Staalplaat had its base. Much music they sold (or released!) I did not know. The soundscape experimental type of music is not really my thing, but they also had music that I did like. I discovered Wumpscut there for example.

When the German city of Berlin was going to be the hippest city in Europe, Staalplaat moved there.

In August 2020 I was in Berlin and decided to find out how Staalplaat would be housed nowadays. The part of town they are in does not seem to be a part that the common tourist stumbles into by accident. Also, when you do not know the address, you may very well pass the place unnoticed.

The store is still tiny, messy, with mostly music that is unknown to me (20 years down the line I would expect to know a bit more), but they also have a lot of art-books, magazines, etc.

Still a fun place to visit.

When someone famous dies, everybody suddenly is a fan and people start to dig up memories. Let me chime in for the colorful face of The Prodigy.

In 1992 the debut album “The Prodigy Experience” was released. My younger brother already knew the band. I guess “Charlie” or “Out Of Space” had been released as singles before the full-length album. He has this massive “The Prodigy Experience” poster which stuck on the wall of our shared room.

Again, this is not really a “story”, but since I already have flyers, demos, 7″s and magazines galleries filed under “stories”, I will use it this time too. I will show off my shirt ‘collection’. They are not all music shirts, but since most of them are, I just put them together. It is but a part of the shirts that I have, but it would not be too interesting to see shirts that you can still just order, would it? I never meant to have a shirt collection, but over the years I got myself quite a few. Most of what you see here I never wear. They are no longer ‘represent’ the music that I listen to, the shirt is too big, too small, of too cheap material or I did use to wear them, but they start to wear.

Anyway, enjoy.

Read More »Shirt show-off

I like vinyl, but I seldom buy it since I seldom play it. 7″s I do have quite a few though. This is partly because before the internet 7″s were a cheap way to get to know new music and of course 7″s are sometimes fairly exclusive releases. Here come a few covers. The scans did not turn out too well, but I am sure all are listed in Discogs too anyway, so…Read More »7″

Recently I have been reading some books about the history of industrial music. “Assimilate“, “Industrial Evolution” and “England’s Hidden Reverse” (not yet finished when I write this). “Assimilate” starts with the early scenes of Northern England, Berlin and San Francisco, but soon speaks only of relatively popular bands and projects.
“Industrial Evolution” focusses on the UK, but this is not strange, because it started as a book about Cabaret Voltaire. The author has nothing good to say of more extreme projects such as Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend.Read More »A little peek into early industrial

Want to read this with background music? Check this out.

It is funny how memory works. When somebody would ask me about my musical background I would start with something like the following. My father has a fairly big vinyl collection and a varried taste, so from an early age I encountered all kinds of different music. As a youngster I went to popfestivals and when I started to develop a musical taste of my own around the age of 12, I leaned towards more alternative music styles. Lateron my taste got a big ‘rougher’ with a Guns’n’Roses period slowly growing towards metal. When I had to double a year on highschool, I shared the class with a guy who listened to death metal. Unfamiliar with the style, I listened to a large part of his huge collection. There was not a whole lot that I liked. Deicide and Macabre were about it. Then we heard about the upcoming debut album of the Swiss black metal band Samael (“Worship Him” 1991) which was for me a more interesting style and for the class-mate a step towards even darker music.Read More »My early days in dark music

I always say that I have never been much of a magazine reader. I do not really care much what artists that I listen to have to say. Still, when I was looking for something the other week, I ran into a firm pack of “fanzine”, “zine”s, “magazine”s and similar publications. The peak lays in the years 1994 to 1996, the time that I shifted from metal to industrial music. I was surprised to see how many magazines that I have that feature both these scenes. There are also some classic interviews. I might want to read back a couple of them some time. Here are some covers for your enjoyment.Read More »Magazines

Yesterday I needed a cassette tape to check if I connected my tape player correctly. Since then I have been delving through my demo collection. I thought it would be nice to share some covers with you. When you can read an address, the chance is small that it is still correct. These demos are from about 1991 to 2000. Contrary to my ancient flyer publication of a while back, I did not use the scanner this time. It was a ‘quicky’ using my camera-phone, so no guarantees for quality. I have not checked if these demos are on Discogs, if all projects still exist or exist again and I picked them relatively at random, but of course some brought back memories so they were easiest to pick. There may be something for many of you here!Read More »Demo covers

Many years ago I wrote for a metal magazine called “Battle Helm”. I took care of “the goth pages”, a section with non-metal music. For the website I made some kind of introduction into ‘goth music’, saying a few things about the styles and presenting photos of the audiences. As you can see in the other stories, “gothic” is an umbrella term, a “scene” covering a whole range of music. When you are familiar with the scene a little, it is often relatively easy to tell what is the main kind of music that a person listens to just by looking at him or her. Somehow people like to extract their identity from some (sub)(sub)culture that they are in. Now things are of course not so black and white. (Almost) all people listen to different kinds of ‘goth’ or even music from other scenes. They might just like the ‘look and feel’ of one of these genres, dress up according to the concert they go to or just find their own style regardless of what other people look like. Especially with the average age of goths getting higher, the number of people looking (relatively) normal raises (most people do not go to work with a mohawk) and it seems that the older you get, the more varried your musical taste becomes and the less obvious it is to adopt the ‘style’ of one of them. In any case, at a festival such as the Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig (annually at Whitsun) almost all gothic subcultures come together. Let us have a look and try to put these people in convenient boxes. Most of the photos that I use are from the WGT photogallery. With this I mean no offense to the people on them or the people who took them. Drop me a note when I crossed a line.