Kraak present a line-up featuring some of most exciting artists working within Belgium's fertile electronic music scene as part of the week-long Belgium Booms series of events.

Köhn, aka Gent-based composer Jürgen De Blonde, has been releasing well-loved albums on Kraak since the late 90's, shaping early influences such as Vangelis and Kraftwerk into new forms that owe as much to bands like Tortoise and Trans Am. Antwerp's Lieven Martens Moana casts off from his previous moniker, Dolphins Into The Future, into a more expansive sonic territory that evokes Varese and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Musician/filmmaker Floris Vanhoof arrives fresh off the back of a well received split with Keith Fullerton Whitman on Shelter Press and Brussels-based Benjamin Franklin mixes casio pop abstractions with guitar and synth densities. Gent band Maan round off the bill with a sound that draws from the stark confessionals of the likes of Smog and Arab Strap and meshes it to Angelo Badalamenti-esque undercurrents.

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KÖHN (GENT)

Jürgen De Blonde (Born in Eeklo, 1975) is a self-taught musician and composer. Not having an academic background, De Blonde’s interest in music has always been eclectic, allowing influences from a wide range of styles and sounds. Early influences were Jean Michel Jarre, Jan Hammer, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Sonic Youth, Robert Wyatt, Spaceman 3, as well as Aphex Twin and Autechre alongside the experience of playing in a number of bands ranging from jazz to noise rock.

Early on De Blonde expanded his instrumentarium with electric and acoustic guitars, samplers, beat boxes, four track recorder and whatever he got his hands on that could produce sound. He started making songs and sound experiments which he compiled onto tapes. Eventually this resulted in a number of modest releases on small tape labels. By the mid-nineties he rediscovered the love for electronic music through experimental acts such as Oval, Germ, Microstoria and post-rock acts like Tortoise and Trans Am. He started making his own electronic compositions and this resulted in his first cd album in 1998 on KRAAK under the name “Köhn”. A second album followed in 1999, with a growing number of live shows across Europe and also in being asked by Sonic Youth to open their show at the Ancienne Belgique as a result. Meanwhile De Blonde had also joined de portables releasing a number of albums with that band and playing numerous live shows. In 2009 KRAAK released his Köhn comeback lp “We need more space in the cosmos”, on which he grasped back to his early synthesizer heroes.



LIEVEN MARTENS MOANA (ANTWERP)

Lieven Martens Moana’s first album under his birth name marks an important shift in his oeuvre. While still indebted to the universe created under his moniker Dolphins Into The Future, ‘Music From The Guardhouse’ explores a musical research program within the ‘composer genre’.

Through literature and landscape painting Martens has developed a language that is as close to the personal-spiritual documentary as to contemporary classical music. Quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley in its opening piece ‘Aria, The Cloud’ the tone is set for an intimate but extroverted modernist take on neo-romanticism. The album is conceived as a play for magnetic tape recorder, using field recordings and midi devices as its round characters. Rich musical intertextuality, ranging from Baudelaire to Toru Takemitsu and Messiaen, cleverly chaperones the theatre of sound, emphasizing every shift and every detail while still allowing time and space for reflection between the acts. More than ever Martens’s work is the result of a deep process of enlightening. All along the deliberately chosen archaisms are beautifully transcended, making these compositions a constant game of question and answer between past and present.



FLORIS VANHOOF (GENT)

Connecting his many worlds, ideas and influences into highly personal live performances and recordings, Floris Vanhoof keeps on amazing people here and abroad. His vinyl debut on Ultra Eczema, was followed by Cycles of Confusion on Kraak, as well as a well-received split with Keith Fullerton Whitman.

Connecting his many worlds, ideas and influences into highly personal live performances and recordings, Cycles of Confusion unites two different aspects of Vanhoof’s work. Side A is a live piece recorded to four tracks and mixed in his home studio. It shows Vanhoof’s Riley inspired side, focussing on consciousness outside the mind as evoked by modular synth sounds. Side B is a very unique composition based on various field recordings, ranging from a classical orchestra tuning their instruments to the sound of an old pinball game.



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (BRUSSELS)

Brussels-based Benjamin Franklin mixes casio pop abstractions with guitar and synth densities.

toutes fenêtres ouvertes from bfkn on Vimeo.

MAAN (GENT)

It is hard to avoid symbolic interpretation when K080 reintroduces the eighties sound in the KRAAK catalogue. Maan consist of two Flemish engineer students in their early twenties. They do not only love their sciences cold, their debut LP ‘Manifold’ harks back to the misanthropic aesthetics of Belgium’s wave era.

But Maan are not the kind of revivalists you would expect them to be. Although the four track garage sound makes them sound like a lost demo tape of teenage angst expression of those days, they owe as much to the literary side of the Shadow Ring, the roughness of The Fall or even the intoxicated parlando-and-bass methods of early Arab Strap. Performances of Maan always show the band’s many different angles. Their link to a couple of young Belgian visual artists had them playing at art galleries a lot when they just started out. ‘Manifold’ is the product of song writing, although the trashy art school vibe is present all the same.