Glasvocht

OTHIN SPAKE

In March 2005 drummer Teun Verbruggen (Jef Neve trio, Flat Earth Society…) invited the eccentric guitar player Mauro Pawlowski (dEUS, Somnambula) and piano-Rhodes wizard Jozef Dumoulin (Mäâk Spirit, Magic Malik, Octurn…) to play a single session based on pure improvisation. The result left most people wondering how the categorize what they had just heard and landed them gigs in Jazz Middelheim, the Petrol and the Flanders Jazz Meeting .Two years later the band have played at many Jazz venues both in Belgium and abroad, released the first cd of a trilogy and invited bass legend Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Fantomâs, John Zorn) and New York harpist extraordinaire Shelley Burgon to play at Bluenoterecordsfestival, Gand.
They played with Fred Vanhove at Northseajazz and with Andrew d’Angelo at Motives for Jazz, Belgium.
They will release a cd with these guests in January 2009.

HARRIS NEWMAN

Harris Newman is a Montreal based guitarist and mastering engineer.
He spends his days running Grey Market Mastering, and devotes his spare time to numerous musical projects, including his solo work, Triple Burner, Hrsta (both bands with GY!BE members), and the now-defunct Sackville.
As a guitarist Newman is known for his quick fingerpicking style and experimental sonics.
His recordings have been released by Strange Attractors Audio House, Constellation, Kning Disk, and Mag Wheel records.

MAURO ANTONIO PAWLOWSKI

In Belgium, everyone knows Mauro Pawlowski as an adventurous musician. He is the founder of both Evil Superstars and Mauro & The Grooms and is the current guitarist of dEUS. But apart from that, he’s also active in many other, more obscure and mainly improvisation-based projects, such as Othin Spake, Höôr, The Love Substitutes, Bum Collar…
These new recordings, again under the name of ‘Mauro Antonio Pawlowski’, is a sequel to his LP ‘Secret Guitar‘, released a few years ago on the Belgian label Roborecords. Solo-guitar improvisation, in the mind of Derek Bailey, which Mauro defines as “etnical Belgian improvisation music”.

Teledroom

Teledroom is the new recording project of The Ordinary Seaman and Wio. These two homerecorders allreasy made a cd-r together some years ago, but with “Two Twos” they seem to have really found each other.

“Two Twos” slowly grew, over a period of two years, from loose improvised recordings to a cohorent and varied full-cd. It mixes the best of both Ordinary Seaman’s and Wio’s worlds, resulting in a laidback easy listening cd, spiced up with sparse electronica and melodic soundscapes.

The Ordinary Seaman is in fact Filip Gheysen, who also runs Glasvocht records. He’s also known for his other projects Alfa and Picturesque.
Wio is a member of de Portables, and released a solo cd in 2001. He is now working on new recordings to be released on (K-RAA-K)3.

Noxagt

Norwegian band Noxagt is the group of Kjetil D. Brandsdal (see solo-records on Corpus Hermeticum, Estatic Peace and more). Other members are Nils Erga and Jan Christian L. Kyvik. Ugly bass grunts, drum machines and more noisy rock.
Noxagt’s charm is in its refusal to buy into a comfortable structure, except for its chaotic, self-destructive explosions of Crass-styled anarchy.

Flies Inside The Sun

Flies Inside The Sun is a group from New Zealand rising out of the ashes of Dadamah, featuring Kim Pieters, Peter Stapleton, Tanaka-Nixon’s Danny Butt an Brian Cook. Mixing an improvisational base, with subtle feedback, splattering guitar buildups and synth noise into a lovely blend sound. They released records on Kranky and Metonymic (Stapleton’s label).

Random Reflections

Koen Willaert and Filip Gheysen from the area of Roeselare started coming together with their guitars just making noise and feedbacks as loud as possible. In 1998 they decided to take their noise more seriously and they played under the name Cloudscape. They recorded a lot of tapes full of improvising minimalistic guitardrones.
Later Koen found a more spontaneous sounding name and they changed their name into Random Reflections.
Now it’s still the same music, but a third member moved into Ran. Ref. named Dorian Mathay, who even as the other two members played with Laurent Cartuyvels for Toss and R.O.T.
These days most of the time Ran Ref is only Koen, while Dorian and Filip (and sometimes other people) work under the name Cloudscape.

Lovely Midget

Lovely Midget, aka Rachel Shearer formed in 1987 a band in Port Chalmers/Otago (New Zealand) called Angelhead and released a tape on the Xpressway label. Then she moved to Auckland and became part of a girl rockband Queen Meanie Puss and released singles on Flying Nun and Siltbreeze. After this band she started solo as Fischmunt, using tape loops, sampler and guitar.
In ‘95 Rachel returned to the South sea and started Lovely Midget and released recordings on labels like Estatic Peace (label of Thurston Moore) and Corpus Hermeticum.
Shearer has recently formed the band Metralleta with Guy Treadgold on drums and Sean O’ Reilly on guitar.

Loren Connors

Loren MazzaCane Connors (US) was busy with music since his childhood. As a child he studied violin, trombone and guitar.
Later on he decided to work as improvisation musician and released his first record in 1978. Before settling Loren MazzaCane Connors in 1993 he worked under numerous names like Loren MazzaCane, Loren Mattlei and Guitar Roberts. He has performed with Keiji Hano, Alan Licht, Jim O’ Rourke, Chan Marshall, Darin Gray, Rafael Toral, John Fahey, Thurston Moore, Henry Kaiser, Dean Roberts and many other fantastic artists.
He also started up a band named Haunted House.

Picturesque

A few years ago, Filip Gheysen (also from Teledroom and The Ordinary Seaman) started with Picturesque from the idea of making a soundtrack for paintings of his favorite painters like Francis Bacon or Mark Rothko and recorded the tape “Dedicated To Painters”, in the time that he also started Glasvocht as a tape label. The tape “Imaginary Paintings”, was a noisetape made by the idea of making imaginary paintings, made by sounds instead of a brush.
Next to other projects which he collaborated with, like Random Reflections, Alfa and R.O.T., many Picturesque works were based on structured sound and accident, using guitar, samples, electronics and toys, which did result in the cd-r “The Chaotic Comfort of Electronic Sex.”.
The very first cd-release “A final Expression Remains to be Found” is an album with seven untitled tracks, but they overflow into eachother, so you can behold it as a long piece of ± 45 minutes. Synthnoise and guitardrones, slowly constructed to melodic electronics, samples and loops, results into an abstract expression, remains for the listener to be found…

Three Black Boxes

Filip Gheysen, GLASVOCHT RECORDS labelguy and allround wizzkid Jürgen De Blonde (aka KÖHN, also de Portables and about a dozen other projects) team up. Expect a mix of guitar and electronic drones with noisy eruptions.

Toss

Toss could stand as the mothership for what Veglia stands for. Started out as a more floating drone-band in the early days it quickly changed into a monster with a high focus on “freewheeling” improvisation. Often compared to the Belgian angle towards New Zealand (Dead C., Sandoz lab Technicians, Birchville Cat Motel), or even direction Uk (being Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunroof!) it is clear their music isn’t easy to digest. Sometimes layers of noisy guitars are smashed with radio-frequencies and irregular drum patterns. But even so there are quite moments with hints of romance in it. They use anything they can find: broken tapedecks, violins, building tools, and love to improvise along the way.

Info about all other artists from compilations and other, check links…