A Preface.
It is almost the end of 2013 and we are well into the digital age. Music distribution has radically changed over the last twenty years. Music subcultures have come and gone since the birth of popular music; they have drowned old waves of sound and, with them, brought new ones. Music, like culture, dominoes. It comes and goes. It borrows, reinvents and recreates itself. While we long to rip the clear packaging off a CD, or Tape, and long to listen to tracks in the order they were meant to be listened to, we must embrace the times we live in. We must continue to create, praise, love, and indulge in this art. We continue to hold this art in its highest regard- the content, titles, lyrics, the feelings, the year-their seasons,–the visual art- no more important than the sonic. And while many claim, a computer does not have a heart and soul, we easily dissolve this notion by immersing ourselves in the very real emotions-whatever they may be- we feel every time we hear one of our favorite electronic compositions.
Music is timeless-we remind you. There are of course certain key aspects here and there that may pay their homage to certain periods of time, trends, or waves. But its most magical aspect, which stays the same, is that it can still evoke raw emotions many years later. It never losses its potency. We’ve rediscovered it first hand many many times before.
We leave you with this 2 year old Radio Soulwax’s Cherry Moon on Valium– a project which took Belgium techno from the 1990’s and slowed it down. Relevant much?
“Even though these Belgian records sound very “now”, they are actually 20 years old and were meant to be played at a much, much faster speed. At the time this was the devil’s music for us, but we have learned to listen through the claps and distorted kicks and discovered that if you slow these really dark and heavy techno records down all the way to about 115 bpm, it suddenly makes them sound less frantic, ballsier and a lot sexier. Belgium at its best when pitched down.
The covers of these records are quite generic and don’t really lend themselves to animating , so we figured we would bring you the visual aspect of this musical genre that you can’t not be fascinated by: the dance. We were very lucky to have found some people who can still do the typical moves, and with them dancing in front of the record sleeves (and sometimes inside of them) we bring you our ultimate tribute to a glorious period in our Belgian musical heritage.
We feel very strongly about this hour, and would like to show that quite often, the best things in life are already right in front of us, we just have to open our eyes (and ears) to them. We stand corrected!”
