⸖ muzika

Een prachtig citaat, van Nietzsche nog wel! suggereert het internet. 🤔 Maar nent. 😔 Maar maakt niet – “life is music”, prentte ons in een ander tijdperk en nog steeds? alweer? Studio Brussel terecht in. En omdat woorden er soms toe doen, een definitie:

Muziek is 🙌 een in tijd geordend akoestisch fenomeen: bevat als dusdanig niet noodzakelijk tekst, ritme, of melodie. Alle muziek heeft inherent bestaansrecht. Álle muziek, dus ook, zeer zeker zelfs, Frans Bauer. Maar hmm, letterlijk alle muziek? Toch liever niet Sam Gooris.. Omdat er nu eenmaal gelukkig uitzonderingen mogen, of grenzen aan de goedheid kúnnen bestaan. 😅 Hier staat de he.le. dag. deze of gene muziek op, ze heeft mijn leven lang mijn leven beïnvloed en gevormd. En bijgestaan.

Dat was, merkte Frits onlangs, Louis Neefs, 1970. Nog paar jaar vóór The Limits to Growth. De hippies visionair? of louter legitiem bummed door het verdwijnen van groen gras en zeezicht, natuurlijk. En ¿por qué no los dos?.. Verder hertalen moet 😒 maar er stond nog in het Engels:

Music shaped life. Presumably more profoundly so than books and movies, perhaps because hearing comes before seeing. 🤔 It also served as a guide and gateway to the other arts, intermingling with them by way of subject matter, imagery, outright reference, or all of those. One of my pet peeve subject matters is life imitating art – zoals dan ook bezongen door Lana Del Rey, en.. eh. No time. ENOTIME

I could/would/should elaborate on so many things, if only time allowed. 😒

• I'm often grateful to my former self for having been feeding a last.fm account since late December of the year of our Lord 2007 (380 CO₂ ppm).
• There is the peculiar pleasure and/or benefit of playing music slower. It truly embellishes improves 🤖 ENHANCEs a lot of music in many ways; of course by far not all, and not all to the same extent.
• While probably.. ⅗, or ⅝ of the music I hear is devoid of any lyrics at all, lyrics of course can be quite something. Educational, beautiful, some even.. ominously prescient. 😶‍🌫️ Perhaps. Also, often, annoyingly.. hermetic maybe? And of course often several of those at once. Or none of them at all; and even then not at all necessarily redundant, porque 🎶 la cuca-maa-rcha, 🌵 la cucamarcha! Liever dan whop-whopp – 🎉 Gangnam Style.

Aside, for most all lyrics I copy/paste here and mostly there, I've come to rely on Genius.com first (then internet searches, booklet scans on Discogs if the need is pressing and we're lucky). It's just one of those sites.. I don't know where it came from, but it rarely disappoints, so more than well deserves a mention. But les go then, a multitude, nay abundance, of music, in no particular ord.. hmm in alphabetical order at least, but otherwise in utterly incomplete, totally ill-considered total disarray:

• 🇩🇪 Aalfang mit Pferdekopf, at the time opening my mind for what at first seemed needless(ly) EXPERIMENTAL weirdness
• 🇧🇪 Aguirre records, doing the Lord's work
• Need to collect AMBIENT here.. 🫠 but it makes up.. ⅓? ⅗.. of my listening habits, including several artists not already noted elsewhere in this list, which until just then didn't even mention Brian Eno.
• 🇹🇳 Anouar Brahem playing the oud
• Ah, from A to Z the music label 🐜 Ant-Zen embodies (“exemplifies”? English, please..) the role and relevance of a music label: more often than not but not necessarily merely sonically, or aurally? in nature. In Ant-Zen at first glance of course there is an ant, and zen, but, says the Discogs, it's deduced from “Anti Zensur”.. We came here for the music! and it is manifold, Ant-Zen mostly was industrially noisy. For one of far too many highlights let's highlight forza belgica and anno 202x somehow 😶 topically relevantly named 🇧🇪 Imminent Starvation industrially appropriating Tanzmusik. Not misspelt when first released on a mostly shabby 1997 compilation tribute to Kraftwerk.
• Out of Greater Manchester came 🇬🇧 Autechre, decades of trailblazing electronics
• initially out of 🇳🇴 Norway came 🤘 BLACK METAL (quadruple the bass drum!)
  • 🇦🇹 Abigor – “no one could foresee the end has come so fast”
  • 🇧🇪 Ancient Rites – “remember the moment Jerusalem fell..”
  • 🇬🇧 Cradle of Filth, though turning/renaming the Nordic/Norse “black” into the arguably more appropriate qualifier extreme
  • Dimmu Borgir – 2nd wave? melodious at least
  • Emperor – “I float among them, on wings once broken”
  • 🇧🇪 Enthroned – if it had to be an unforested part of Wallonia, Charleroi was probably an appropriate urban equivalent to hail from
  • if Dimmu Borgir for melody, then even more so Limbonic Art
  • ancient Mayhem
  • 🇩🇪 Nocte Obducta
  • Troll — “Drep de kristne” may seem silly for a slogan in the 1990s, but then of course the entire genre may seem to be that kind of silly. It's art, imagery – who would paint their face for any other reason.
• 🇸🇪 Cold Meat Industry.. As with Galakthorrö ↓ (and gothic and italo disco ↓↓) and Raster-Noton ↓↓↓ below it doesn't makes sense to try and outline the significance of a record label (or genre) in a list item. Already merely 'cause where to begin between Bocksholm (not even on CMI, do I notice only now 🤦), Brighter Death Now, Deutsch Nepal, Raison D'être, and so many more.
  If only for its title, a fitting highlight album for these, our troubling troubled times would be Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio's Apocalips (September 2006/379). The artist and album over time have become a bit tepid to my taste, but some tracks remain notably exceptional, if not exceptionally notable – like track 8 here: “Let the Words of My Murder Be the Last Words You Hear”.
• on the whole tranquil 🇫🇷 Colleen, less tranquil 🇹🇳 Deena Abdelwahed (bringing us.. queer resounding Arabian bass music?) and again on the whole tranquil 🇹🇷 Ekin Fil & Brooklyn-based Middle Eastern-rooted 🇺🇸  Faten Kanaan – I list these last four names in one bullet item in the name of female-fronted metal music and merely since they somewhy fitted nicely alphabetically 🤷
• 🎤 FIELD RECORDINGS. Elsewhere on this page, Dutch Wiktionary provided a definition of music obviously much the same as English – “a series of sounds organized in time”, with some elaboration, and adding “often to convey a mood”. Field recordings must meet the definition at its barest, as do ↓ power electronics, of course sh(r)edding any trace of harmony or tranquility found in nature and reality, and outdoing industrial or mechanical noise. Raw recorded reality obviously is the most basic manipulation of sound.
  While field recordings can be.. deployed here and there, they certainly can be taken on as, and considered to be a genre in themselves – and as such have music labels (like Gruenrekorder) devoted to them, and “artists”, esteemed or distinct. In no particular order e.g.
  • 🇫🇷 Yannick Dauby (one of those people capable of just.. packing up and relocating to another continent for.. reasons, be they 🐸 frogs or.. what do I know)
  • 🇬🇧 Chris Watson, like no many others :l showcasing the extent to which sound can be treated or left untreated.. Que todo el mundo suba al Tren Fantasma, por así decirlo.
  • 🇫🇷 Marc Namblard (“La Nuit du Cerf” 🦌, or immerse yourself in les Cévennes, among many another location..)
  • 🇺🇸 Ernst Karel (seminal Swiss Mountain Transport Systems)
  • 🇮🇳 Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (just his Elegy for Bangalore a work of art)
  • 🇳🇿 Annea Lockwood, introducing us to many locations, like a river, or two
  't Be a lonnng, too long a list, so I apologise for off-the-top-of-me-head omitting all the names here. 🇫🇷 Rodolphe Alexis, 🇦🇺 Kate Carr.. So many, especially when including the artists merely “deploying” a field recording on occasion, like the highly acclaimed 🇲🇽 Jorge Reyes.. 🫥
• 🇨🇦 FM Attack (“dreams come true..”) but he ought to be in a sublist of.. SYNTHWAVE or some such
• 🇳🇱 Frans Bauer! Steeds vol van eenvoudige wijsheid, oprecht, dunkt Frits. 🤷
• 🇩🇪 Galakthorrö ⸮? November Növelet, and ⸭ Aufgabe | Hingabe ⸭ – and all.. ⸮? Quite a bit of ↓ power electronics. But then, “angst pop”, later, too..
• 🇧🇪 Get Ready! grenzend aan het goede 😏 maar laat o-o-owéo is nooit te Laat (1996/365)  🦄
• All manner of 🙌 “GOTHIC”, I suppose. But what all can't be in a word. 😐 It's farrr too broad a designation, not as much as, but much like ambient ↑ up there. There's quite some overlap with NDT ↓ below, and with darkwave and many other vibes and 🌊 waves. It must be why the iconic WGT music festival is called that.
  “Gothic” as music comes as rock (perhapsay, 🇬🇧 The Cure, for some value, or 🇺🇸 Faith and the Muse, or 🇺🇸 Cinema Strange) and metal, too (ranging from I suppose maybe 🇺🇸 London After Midnight to nordic again 🇳🇴 Tristania and 🇳🇴 Theatre of Tragedy), but “gothic” will also refer to a language, a people, architecture, fonts, and all, so.. 🤷 Well, a name, a word – language.
• 🇮🇹 italo DISCO (“prossima fermata è il futuro..”) ❲Autumn 2025 insert: while reading up some on Wikipedia, I learned about Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979/337 Major League Baseball promotion event in Chicago – 'Murika “living and letting die” much? again 😐 it must be in the genes, mustn't it..❳
• 🇮🇹 Kirlian Camera – Schmerz (“Parte sì tutta la gente..”)
• 🇩🇪 Kraftwerk quoi – 🎶 Endlos, endlos.. 🤐😶‍🌫️
• 🇫🇷 Land: “art is our memory, art is our history, here is our destiny..” want van culturele bagage gesproken: gewoon regelrecht Иди и смотри (naar Come and See, de iconische Sovjetfilm uit 1985), maar ook minder regelrecht bracht ons pakweg Praha met vele jaren vertraging via 🎹 Mili's Carousel (Lovely Acrobatics) naar Morgiana (of retroactief, omgekeerd.. 🤔 same difference)
• 🇫🇷 Les Joyaux de la Princesse.. Mag/kan een hebbeding van 7" vinyl nog "hebbeding" heten als het >300 € kost? Quoi qu'il en soit, il était une fois, l'Allemagne était toujours en lutte “avec l'énergie du désespoir”, mais tout aussi bien, dans la vie moderne (1937/310), il y avait eu 🙌 l'Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques. À Paris.
• 🇩🇪 Mater Suspiria Vision, WITCH HOUSE, with a touch of TRAP maybe - oh 🇺🇸 BLVCK CEILING, in that regard, and 🇷🇺 “грустная сука, грустная сука..”
• 🇺🇬 MC Yallah & 🇮🇪 Eomac – Kakana (“Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram!”)
• MINIMAL WAVE, so much of it from way back then (say our own 🇧🇪 A Blaze Colour), and then its revival (🇬🇧 “union leads to severance” (2012/391))
• 🇩🇪 NDT
  • 🇦🇹 Blut und Asche, ein Drama als Komödie verstanden.. (1997/363)
  • das Wort — das nur gedacht; die Tat — die nur geplant (1992/356)
  • “..wenn ich verwest im Boden ruh', so süß der Duft des Fliederstrauchs..”
  • 🇨🇭 “doch ich lebe, ich lebe immer noch..”
  • Gottes Tod
  • Vanitas, vanitas.. und 👻 wir töteten uns jedesmal aufs Neue..
• As they did out of Greater Manchester, out of 🇬🇧 Newcastle upon Tyne, too, came decades of trailblazing electronics, of an entirely different, ambient kind:
  • :zoviet*france: – what to say.. “just what is not true”
  • rather prolific Rapoon – good luck to you sifting your way through a thousand-and-counting releases.. luckily “there are. no answers” anyway, as “we live in the dark. we live in a dream.. tell Charlene?”
  • underrated or maybe just lesser-known because not all that prolific Penumbra – välkommen till Skandinavien, bring your Anoraks for the trip
• 🇺🇸 Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (there we were now.. in 1991/352)
• 🇫🇮 Pan Sonic – forza Suomi, and RIP Mika Vainio
• POWER ELECTRONICS
  • 🇮🇹 Atrax Morgue, the Game is Closed.. RIP Marco Corbelli, wisely passing away nearly 20 years ago already..
  • 🇩🇪 Genocide Organ (“waiting for a moment that I know will come”)
  • 🇮🇹 N. – “Sapete dirmi come noi siamo diventati cattivi?”
• 🇩🇪 Predominance – Hindenburg (“oh the humanity, and all the passengers..” (1937/310))
• 🇩🇪 Born as Raster-Noton before the turn of the century, Raster-Media has been enhancing the world with lots of marvellous fringe electronics. No point here in beginning to list, and trying to describe quantity and quality of artists such as Alva Noto, Atom™, 🇯🇵 Ryoji Ikeda, and Senking.
• 🇬🇧 Red Laser Records – neo-italo? and suchlike
• 🇩🇪 Scooter – How Much Is the Fish? (there we went! there we went! there we went! again.. in 1998/368), and 🇩🇪 Snap!, but their signature song transcended the genre, so rather Eurodance à la ↓ Whigfield, or sum'
• 🇧🇷 Sepultura – Chaos A.D. (“strip-mine the Amazon..” (1993/360))
• 🇸🇪 Tarmvred – Oskulden, the truly marvellous highlight track on Tintorama, the 2005/382 vinyl-only EP and final output of an artist disappearing into obscurity, over 20 years ago already.. Which was a few years after, in 2001/367 – so a quarter century ago already – the.. groundbreaking? genre- (i.e. rhythmic noise if it be needing a name) defining? CD Subfusc. Vart tog han vägen? Veni, vidi, vici?
• 🇺🇸 The Flashbulb – Autumn Insomnia Session (drums, oh the drums.. 2005/379)
• 🇬🇧 Ultravox? '80s wave, synth.. Midge Ure, “two eyes staring cold and silent”..
• 🇨🇦 Vromb, like Rapoon, though luckily not as prolific: one person with a remarkable gift of reshaping and transforming their signature sound, remanifesting themselves over and over for decades on end.. Accordingly demanding dedicated listening effort, rewarding as it rarely turns bland.
• 🇩🇪 Wappenbund: “Bewegten Herzens danke ich..” – dann aber eher als eine Ikone der MARTIAL industrial :: “schütz' die Heimat vor fremden Fahnen; schreitet voran, und hab' kein Erbarmen :: but then INDUSTRIAL in general would need much more than this mere mention, being a most fuzzy, broad term like ↑ gothic above)
• 🇩🇪 Welle: Erdball (“ich weiß's nicht, ichh könnt' ja'ber mal..” — “sei aber still!”; 1998/364) – if there were a contender for the title of.. latter-day Kraftwerk..
• 🇩🇪 Snap!, but their signature song transcended the genre, so rather.. 🇪🇺 Whigfield – EURODANCE in the 1990's (“can't you see?” Sexy Eyes ❲🙏 Amen remix perhaps❳ on a Saturday Night)
• 🇺🇸 William Basinski's dreamy Silent Nights in the Garden of Brokenness — TAPE LOOPS really.. ❲and Basinski not the first, nor the last somehow/somewhy obnoxious hifalutin artist forcing us to ignore the human and get away with the wonderful music❳

ʬ