music stories

I am not much of a person who collects a lot of things or who cannot throw anything away. Somehow I have collected quite a load of flyers over the years though. For a while I wanted to scan some of those so I can post them, but this is (of course) quite a bit of work. In the end I did a ‘quick and dirty’ scanjob and give you here a gallery with ‘classical flyers’, forgotten bands or just scans of flyers to show what these things looked like.Read More »Flyers and collectors cards

The term “neofolk” was supposedly invented by a Berlin record shop to describe the sound of the band Death In June. Douglas P. liked the term and started to use it himself. In basis, neofolk needs to be nothing more than a guitar and vocals, but of course the sound and more especially the attitude/lyrics/image make neofolk neofolk. Before there was neofolk, a band called Changes already made this kind of music, including the lyrics and image. This band was first founded in 1969, but it was not before their third incarnation before material was released. This song is from the “Fire Of Life” album of 1996, but is said to be one of the old songs.Read More »A little lesson in neofolk

The first EBM that I heard was In Absentia. However they have not released anything since 1995, there are still several tracks to be found on Youtube.Read More »A little lesson in EBM

A few remarks to begin with. It will not be possible to give you a very thorough ‘lesson’ in noise with a little bit of text and examples, so just regard this text as an introduction. However I do not find Youtube a very fitting medium to listen to music, it does have some advantages for me. First, YT is quite static, a Myspace page will change tracks more often. Second, YT has become so common that with no effort whatsoever, I can ’embed’ YT films, while I would have to go through a lot more trouble to have you listen to Myspace tracks. I am not very fond of ’embedding’, since it means that what you see here, is actually located on another server. I would hate it if people did that with my material, but YT supports it, but the down part is, that when the clip is deleted for whatever reason, I have a broken link om my website. I do not intend to keep checking if the films I link to are still there, but should you find a missing one, just put a comment below and I will see what I can do about it.Read More »A little lesson in noise

This story is a bit out of line for a few reasons. First, in no way it fits within the larger scene of the previous genres that I wrote about. Second, even though I have listed to some projects within it, I did not in the early days. Third, I write this as an outsider. I have never been to houseparties or whatever.
I remember a long, long time ago, in my metal period, I had a discussion with a few guys who listened to “gabber”. I was just growing to be a dark-minded blackmetalhead I abhorred the happy sounds of house music (well, most of it). The reply was that they listened to extreme music and gabber is also extreme music. I did not agree, in fact, I still do not.Read More »Welcome to another edition of Thunderdome

1995, I just started to find my way around the gothic scene, I had just dug through the CMI catalogue, ran into industrial projects and labels when I received a flyer of a “gothic” album “Darkness” (1995) of the Danish project In Absentia, their third and last release. This music was something wholly different from the dark ambient sounds that I listened to then. Danceable, quite cheerfull even and with vocals. For a while I was in contact with the band, learning about “electronic body music” or “EBM” as the music appeared to be called, “tapetrading” I got some more of this material. Soon after buying this cd I was at the Staalplaat store in Amsterdam (they are nowadays located in Berlin). Staalplaat mostly sold weird electronics, industrial experiments, much of it not my kind of music. At the time they also had other material from the industrial scene. Going through the racks my eye fell on the album “Music For A Slaughtering Tribe” of Wumpscut (1993) which was labeled “EBM”. Read More »Die Mensch-Maschine

Soon after discovering CMI I started to scan the gothic scene. I found ‘medievalish’ music such as Ataraxia, Engelsstaub and Faith and The Muse. At some point I heard of the titleless debut album of Orplid (1998). I believe I read something about “medieval” when I had not found anything new of that for some time. I ordered the album directly from Eis und Licht Tonträger. The cd did not sound very medieval, but contained a magnificent victorious kind of folky music. I asked if the label had more of such music and I got some more Orplid releases later such Forseti, Of The Wand And The Moon, Sonne Hagal and Scivias. Read More »Music with a brown edge

When the black metal scene started to produce “ritual music” I was happy to be able to listen to other things than metal. I got in good contact with Mortiis and when the Swedish label Cold Meat Industry contacted him to discuss the release of his second album (“Keiser Av En Dimensjon Ukjent” 1995) I learned about CMI. CMI was founded in 1987, when I learned about them, they had about 20 releases available, most of them sold out. CMI was still a small label and Roger Karmanik still corresponded with his customers, giving me tips about what I would like. I bought, and loved, releases of In Slaughter Natives, Memorandum, Mental Destruction, but most notably Raison d’Être, Deutsch Nepal and Morthond/Morthound. The latter made “dark ambient” in the very recognisable CMI-style. Read More »Industrial music for industrial people

I must have been 18 or 19, at least I had my drivers’ licence. I had been in Prague with school before, so had my brother a year later and we convinced our parents to have holidays in the Czech Republic. From my earlier visit to the city I knew that there were plenty of record stores there. I was still in my metal period, because I have pictures of me wearing a Venom cap and a shirt of the Prague black metal band Root. While going through the tape rack of some recordstore, my eye fell on two tapes of The Sisters Of Mercy. One was “A Slight Case Of Overbombing”, the other one I do not know, since I did not buy it. Since the slight case is called “greatest hits volume one” I suppose the white tape was volume two, but I have never been able to find it, it is not even listed on Discogs! I did not really know the Sisters, I only knew that there were “gothic” and I suppose I was already in my ‘transition period”. I liked the music a lot, but it would take many years before I would actually buy more music of this band. Gothic has never really been my cup of tea.Read More »First and last and always

When I was a youngster at some point I started to like Guns’n’Roses. I bought shirts, had a jacket with patches and everything. At school I met a guy who was totally into death metal. Even though he was younger than myself, he had a massive amount of cds, it seemed to be the only thing he worked for. I lent a great deal of his cds and even though there were some things that I did like, death metal was not really my thing. Metal is a strange phenomenon. It is an umbrella term for a whole range of (mostly extreme) guitar-based music, but it seems that even though the entire spectrum is always there, there are one or two subgenres that flourish. Read More »Lay down your souls to the Gods rock and roll