Gigi - another project of Nick Krgovich - known for P:ano, No Kids and Mount Eerie’s Wind Poem (he’s the keyboard part + the voice of wind) - is great. Excellent retropop with beautiful strings. Gigi based their recordings on the acquisition of vintage plate reverbs. Lots of singers, lots of reverb, lots of classy hooks and vintage arrangements. Be sure to check their LP Maintenant on Tomlab. Also, karl blau is on it.

Arvo Pärt - Da Pacem Domino; 6 utterly beautiful minutes.

100 grim reapers by ben & bruno.

Various Friends - Soup

This is something I’ve been trying to get going for a while. It’s what I call “Musical Soup”. The basic idea is that several people send me a tender & quiet 2-to-3 minute recording of a couple of their favorite instruments, using the notes c#, d#, e, f#, g#, a and b. They’re the ingredients. I throw them all into a giant bowl of tracks in which I play those samples as randomly as possible, but always 8 samples at a time. …And that, will become the musical soup. :-)

I am convinced it will result in a magical piece that will be excellent to fall asleep to, or to read a book to, or any other gentle quiet evening “action”. Even if it is just getting lost in all those sounds. For those wondering; the people playing in this little snippet here are: Pieter Van Dessel, Boris Snauwaert, Ellen Evers, Ralph Steinbrüchel and Peter Broderick.

The goal is to reach at least one hour of this slowly evolving music. If you want to get involved, send me an e-mail.

Another Untitled. This song is another sort of attempt for my electronic/beats/bass june monthly thing. It sure is fun to write music in a total different genre, but really difficult as well.

Hello,

Thanks to those who bought slaapliedjes (physical or digital) and to those who listened too. I hope it worked. :) - As this silly project goes, there’s not much time to stand still with past things, so on the next. For “May” I decided to record/rewrite the songs we play live, but have never been recorded before. So that finally they are archived. Some bits are older than 3 or 4 years. A song we play live a lot has the worktitle “sorry” and i’ve uploaded a preview you could check out. It is by no means finished: fake drums have to replaced by real ones, the second part of the song hasn’t been recorded yet, i’ll probably make a great 4/4 finale cause it has this dancy vibe :). In any case, this is probably a good indication where “may” is going. A faster pace, electric guitars and older wixel-style sounds.

Probably a song on the forthcoming april album. You wouldn’t believe how representative it is. :) aka all songs sound about the same, like this one. But i’m not sure if i’m happy yet. It feels like i should be able to get a lot more out of the idea behind april. The thing i like about it, is that you can’t really tell the songs apart from eachother, they all blur into the same vagueness.. but they’re not the same at all. There is no repetition of structure, melodies or rhythm. It’s just blur. So it’s the most varied music but really similar at the same time. It’s thing i’m after with slaapwel records most of the time. (Letting go of worldly structures and thoughts, drifting off into the vagueness/nothingness/blankness). Like a stream that always sounds the same, though it never is the same. Maybe i’m getting too metaphysical. It’s what i like about morton feldman. He messes with your sense of time and space.

ps: now i think about it, this songs is actually the most structured of them all. the rule for this song was: 2 notes, random timing. repeat. layer. but it sounds more or less the same as the others.

A song I recorded this morning for the 2009 thing.. March will sound like this. My vocal chords could use some practice still.. but there you go. David Berman from the Silver Jews used to sing: “Is it the problem that we can’t see, or is it that the problem is beautiful to me?/Won’t soul music change, now that our souls have turned strange/Repair is the dream of the broken thing/All my favorite singers couldn’t sing.”

A song from the upcoming February album. The song is called “In Clouds”.