Friday, 25 March 2022
OVD056 : Pierre Vervloesem / Not Even Close - Remastered and revised 2021
Friday, 18 March 2022
OCD050 : Baby Fire / Grace
Emerging from the back alleys of the Brussels alternative scene, Baby Fire (see also OCD018, OCD033, ODG070 and ODG120) is a trio defined by a rock style which is full of rage, haunted, powerful and refined.
Body and soul of the project, the guitar player, Dominique Van Cappellen-Waldock, grew up between London and the European capital. Music lover and avid record collector, she did the rounds of the hard rock circuit as well as the great bastions of punk such as the famous London Marquee Club. One evening at a concert in Brussels, she crossed paths with Ronnie James Dio, the emblematic voice of Rainbow and heavy metal culture hero. He listened to her first demo tape and encouraged her to keep singing.
Close to the aesthetic defended by artists such as P. J. Harvey, Shannon Wright or Carla Bozulich, Dominique began to shape her universe through contacts with personalities she met at venues in her own country and abroad. Among these are Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Dana Schechter (Insect Ark, Swans) as well as Eve Libertine and Penny Rimbaud of Crass. In 2014 'The Red Robe' album came into being in the heart of Dial House, mythic headquarters of the British punk collective.
Among the guests of Baby Fire’s 5th album one finds Laetitia Shériff (‘Eternal’), Mike Moya from Godspeed You! Black Emperor (‘Grace’), as well as two punk legends united on one track: Eve Libertine and G.W. Sok (‘Love’).
The artwork by Alice Smith is a reference to Dominique breaking her shoulder shortly before the ‘Grace’ recordings. Following this accident new songs and new themes emerged: the deconstruction and reconstruction of the self, and the search for grace.
Line-up: Dominique Van Cappellen-Waldock (voice, guitar, loops & theremin), Lucile Beauvais (guitar, keyboards & backing vox), Cécile Gonay (bass, violin & backing vox).
Friday, 11 March 2022
OUC038 : REER PROJECT / Erik Satie Vexations - Un Théâtre Acoustique
"As musicians with a classical background, we have dealt with Erik Satie’s music numerous times over the past years. Satie as an artist is iconic for many musicians today and is considered as one of the pioneers of minimalism, many see an ancestor of ambient music in his music. But this is just one side of Satie and as we started to think about our contribution to this project, we agreed that we would like to dedicate ourselves to other sides of Satie’s highly versatile personality. Satie is not only to be associated with minimalism, Satie is also to be associated with nightlife entertainment, absurdism, dadaism and satire. According to certain sources, Satie could have meant Vexations as an ironic comment to Richard Wagner’s music, or even as a parody of the meaningless virtuosity of the perpetuum mobile genre.
In our version of vexations, we chose to condense contradictory musical elements and styles and layer them into a dense musical collage held together by Satie’s repetitive musical phrases. We used elements of avant-garde, jazz, techno and electroacoustic music, sometime disassembling Satie’s original chords or re contextualising them into new harmonies. This resulted in a piece of extreme contrasts between extremely fragile lines - especially in the voice - and jarring accumulations of sound. To create a special atmosphere, the voice makes uses of breath as an important element of expression beneath digital sound processing. The violin sound runs through several analog and digital effect chains at the same time, which process the sound simultaneously in different ways and at the same time interact with each other. We also had the idea to integrate the bombastic language of Satie’s publications for the “Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor”, a one-man sect Satie had created, into the piece. Satie supposedly composed Vexations in the same period in which he created his one-man sect and we found quotes related to this one-man sect to be a necessary artistic paraphrase of Satie’s affinity for satire and absurdism."
REER PROJECT
Esther Kretzinger & Georges-E. Schneider
Friday, 4 March 2022
OPN002 : Domenico Solazzo's PaNoPTiCoN / Live @ De Kriekelaar
Cover art By Domenico Solazzo
Second release in the Domenico Solazzo's PaNoPTiCoN anthology is SEASON 2 : Live @ De Kriekelaar, Brussels, Belgium- 7th march 2008.
Line up:
Olivier Catala (bass)
Diego Delgado Lopez (electric guitar)
Pierrot Delor (percussions)
Antoine Guenet (keyboards) - see also OCD041, OCD042, OCD043, OCD049,ODG140 and ODG148.
Jean-Paul Lossignol (trumpet)
Domenico Solazzo (drums, loopstation, direction)