How great are the odds! I spent the majority of my youth in Bruges, named “Brügge” in German, and that Brügge lies so close to Köhn.
In Bruges I was shaped. In Bruges I learned everything about music. I spent the first three years in Bruges in a Catholic, boys only, boarding school. There was where I got to know Pink Floyd, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, Kitaro, Jan Hammer, Iron Maiden, Helloween, and King Diamond. It is where I got people to tape 12” mixes from Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo and the likes. It’s where I learned about Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and the chilling “Aase’s Death” and where I discovered that I preferred improvising to following a score. This is where I secretly listened to “Geluiden uit de Kosmos”, hidden under my blanket after lights out. It was only the beginning.
“Geluiden uit de Kosmos” was a weekly radio show on BRT (Belgian Radio and Television) that featured all the latest and greatest in cosmic, synthesizer, and new age music. They also played demos and home-made music from listeners. This radio show and Jesus were the two things that got me through my first year of boarding school, that hell of homesickness and snobby, spoiled rich kids. One year later New Beat took over the country. I was fourteen, revolving and revolting. I got detention, I got expelled, I had fun. I made crappy lo-fi new beat with no gear. Hell, my way to multi-track was by overdubbing a Phillips double-cassette, portable boombox. I made serious attempts at making both kosmische Musik in the style of Klaus Schulze and Jean-Michel Jarre, and New Beat equipped with only a Casio HT-3000, a Yamaha PSR-780, and a MIDI cable. It all made sense too, especially when I heard Jarre’s ‘Blah Blah Café’ mixed into an eclectic, bootlegged New Beat DJ-set from Boccaccio that also featured Yello and lots of New Beat obscurities.
Then along came Techno and House music and, funnily enough, they lost me. I slowly turned to guitars and electronic music that wasn’t necessarily dance-oriented. I have never been much of a dancer anyway. My only resource for knowledge was the library and Oor’s Popencyclopedie, in which I read about all these legendary records I could only ever imagine the sound of. I read the chapter on electronic music over and over again. I read about early Kraftwerk, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, Roedelius & Moebius, and Deuter but also Human League, Depeche Mode, New Order, Gary Numan, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and how it all somehow evolved from Pierre Schaeffer’s and Pierre Henry’s Musique Concrète and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Elektronische Musik. All this music, all these records to check out and nowhere to check them out. This was a time before internet, obviously, but this was also a time when you couldn’t even borrow CDs from the library. The music on these records existed in my head, in my imagination that at the same time was running wild with hormones. I was hitting full puberty.
When I was fifteen, I changed schools, following one of my then best friends into art school. By the time I got there, he was gone, off to another school. The city’s art school — boys and girls both, and plenty of them outcasts, artists, and lazy fuck-ups — a was perpendicular shift of direction and mentality! Freedom! And input — tons of input! Art and underground culture and drugs and reckless stupidity! This was the beginning of the nineties, the last decade of the second millennium A.D., and Kurt was on his way.
‘MTV’s 120 Minutes’ hit the tubes: the music show that changed everything for me. My portal to underground and indie music. The list of names and bands I picked
up from that show is endless. The show is probably the main reason I really got into loud, distorted, fuzzy, melodic guitars and whirling sounds and samples. Rave and shoegaze arrived, along with ambient house and chill-out music. It was all there. One evening they played ‘To Here Knows When’ by My Bloody Valentine. Whoah! Wait, isn’t that the same band who made ‘You Made Me Realize’? Whoah! Wait, they are coming to play in Brussels at the AB? And they’re giving away tickets in Humo? Whoa! Wait, I won a ticket? And so, I ended up at My Bloody Valentine in 1991. My life would never be the same.
Meanwhile, the library became my resource for music. They had records, they had CDs, they had a guy who knew his shit and brought in the greatest music. And it was all there, for half a Euro per CD, per three weeks. I copied so much onto cassette.
I hung out with Weirdnolandbouwers and played a live show with them where I got booed at by an all Punk audience for playing keys. Half of this unit would later evolve into ‘de portables’, and the tape-labels Studio Muscle and Toothpick, which in turn was to grow into KRAAK. It all started and flourished in Bruges.
My god, the mess got bigger and bigger. By the time the mid-nineties had arrived, I had become a full-blown bedroom artist. I had my four track cassette machine. I had a couple of cheap guitars. I had a second-hand sampler and a sequencer and I was recording music non-stop. I wanted to get stuff out. The year was 1995. The tape-label was Toothpick. The moniker was Ed Nolbed. The tape was Ajjenol.
There was also The Late Great Planet Earth Club, an album on R&S that featured two tracks by me. I was taken under the wings of Maldegem rock-legend R.B., who later thanked me for my contribution with a Yamaha MD4, the very machine that I used to produce the first two Köhn albums on KRAAK, and the very machine that generates the wonderful feedback noises on this record.
Thinking back on all those memories just kind of depresses me sometimes. Feeling bad and insecure about who I was and who I am today. I guess that’s Bruges too.
‘Brügge’ is all about that. It’s about the silent and peaceful hum and then the pounding starts and the tension rises and then you give in and that’s so liberating. Resistance is so futile.