Musical fridays 2: Charles and the white trash European blues connection.

A while ago I announced a series of ‘musical fridays’, so here’s the second post, with a very obscure song, ‘Americans’ by ‘Charles and the white trash European blues connection’ taken from my ‘song in my head’ posts on facebook…

Hidden somewhere in my CD collection is an obscure CD in a paper case with a picture of the back of some strange guy with the words ‘Charles and the white trash European blues connection’ on it. It’s not at all that clear anywhere whether that’s the name of the band, or the name of the Cd, or both… On the CD if you care to listen to a lot of noise can be found, which is supposed to be music, and that opccupies a niche somewhere in between blues and garage rock, sometimes with a light industrual feel even. There’s not that much information on the case, just the names of band members and stuff like that, and it can be noted that the whole album has been recorded and mixed on one afternoon on april 2nd in 1998. I suspect that it was not the most sober afternoon in those musicians’ lives, but that might just be a prejudice…

There also is a sticker on it with a single name, ‘Arno’, probably a later addiction from the record company to clarify a bit about the CD so they could be able to sell at least a few copies of this record. I’m not sure much copies of it were ever sold, and I even suspect it is out of print now. It’s one of those records that went forgotten in the history of rock’n roll…

All of this doesn’t mean that the ‘Arno’ guy isn’t a big name in the wonderous world of Belgian rock’n roll. The so-called Arno, full name Arno Hintjens, is a well-known Belgian rock-singer, who was the frontman of a band called TC Matic in the seventies/eighties, a noisy band whose greatest hits are called putain putain and oh la la la. But he is also known for his solo music, which is quite variable. He’s the kind of rockstar with a broken voice that sounds like he’s always drunk (or worse) and who sometimes can sound quite inspired on one song, and in the next song just makes plain dumb music. (I thik of a song like bathroom singer, and yes I am a madness fan and still I find this very dumb music) A lot of his songs are in French, and in a surreal twist of weirdness the guy has even been given the knighthood (the title of “Knight in the Arts and Literature” actually) for what he has done for the French language by the French government. Don’t ask me… Europe can be a pretty weird place sometimes if you think about it..

Back to that CD… I don’t like everything Arno has recorded, but I’ve always liked that ‘Charles and the white trash European blues connection’ album a lot, and not only because it’s a good CD to scare guests with… It is one of the albums that brought me alive through my twentysomething years… A very pure form of very basic rock’n roll with a heavy groove and a very raw form of the blues… And still a CD to put on very loudly, as loudly as possible, when my wife isn’t home… but it’s so obscure now I can’t find any of it on youtube except for this Kinks cover ‘death of a clown‘. 6 out of 10 songs are here on grooveshark though…

A song that always stood out for me is the last song, called ‘Americans’, which is a simple tune about the things Americans gave us (Europeans), a subject I’ve been thinking about lately. The music is raw and the vocals are tormented, and very pure, and the lyrics are a bit random and filled with ‘explicit content’ of the type we have been importing from the US a lot…

And now that we’re here, just listen to their version of the old delta blues classic ‘you got to move‘. It won’t get more industrial and garage than this, but then there’s that really incredible harmonica solo, wow…

So, am I the only one who likes Charles and the white trash European blues connection?

peace

Bram

Musical fridays 1: I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (U2)

Music has always been important to me, and that’s why I want to start a series on the music that has inspired me through my life, in many different ways. some music has inspired me as a musician, while other music has been an influence on me as a person, or widened my view spiritually or philosophically.

I hope to be able to post a song with a short story every 2 weeks, and the other week I will do something similar but a bit different, but you’ll have to wait until next week for the details…

Let’s start with one of my favorite songs from my teenage years. While the radio mostly played electronic dance music and the people in school followed that trend or listened to more hard music and alternative rock, I mostly followed my fathers record collection, and listened to stuff like U2 and Bob Dylan. Yes, maybe not that original, but not much people my age (except for my friend MM) were into that stuff at all at the time, so in a way I was a rebel… When I was older I developed a taste for more obscure music and lesser-known names and weird sounds, but the starting point of my musical journey was there with U2 and Dylan.

One of my favorite songs has always been, and will always be U2′s ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’, a song I have blogged about before.

For the spiritual significance, see the blog post I linked to. For the musical significance, just listen to it: to the rhytm, the functional minimalism of the electric guitar and the use of the delay-effect on it, and the passion in Bono’s voice. This is a kind of music that only works because the musicians are giving everything, and without that the song would not be interesting, and it’s actually quite simple.

I have no idea of any influence of the 80′s songs of U2 can be found in my music at all, but I’ve listened to them a lot…

Next week we’ll have another version of these music posts, a series on one of my favorite bands that more people need to know about, and in 2 weeks we’ll have another song that has influenced me a lot in these musical Friday series…

peace

Bram

Some old critique to ‘true love waits’ and Joshua Harris…

true love waits
and that’s okay
but you seem to spend your time waiting
ain’t that extremely frustrating?

(the irresistible 21st century virgin boy)

Last week I had a serious flu and I was quite sick, and not able to do much at all, not even reading or thinking, so I was lying on my bed listening to old CD’s with demo songs that I recorded years ago, when I still used the nick/artist name ‘the irresistible 21st century virgin boy’*. One of the old CD’s contained a song I kissed waiting goodbye that I thought was lost forever, one of my earlier attempts to do something with beats and guitars together in a real song. But it also  vocalised  some critique to a book I mentioned in a recent post (‘I kissed dating goodbye’ by Joshua Harris), and I suppose more broadly to the rhetoric of the people of ‘true love waits’ , who then had a Flemish division here in Belgium that sent me a lot of news letters because I once had carelessly signed one of their pledge cards on some christian event. (It seems they’re out of the running now though , can’t find anything of them anymore lately…)

The song itself was dismissed later because I hated how I hadn’t been able to find a really fitting melody on the sometimes quite random chord progressions. Re-listening there’s something in it that I like, and some things that I hate (that really bad word flow of the ‘don’t concentrate’ part for example.) But is was a good try, even if it got forgotten without ever been played again…

[please listen to the song 'I kissed waiting goodbye' here

(lyrics are there also) and tell me; does it suck completely, or is there still something interesting about it?]

The title ‘I kissed waiting goodbye’ does not mean that I (with my weird artist name) had any problem with the idea of sex as belonging into a marriage relationship (I still believe in that, even though I don’t think a state marriage has much to do necessarily with the definition of marriage) but the whole imported ‘purity culture’ had some exaggerations that I found quite weird. And the local people that preached it were quite peculiar specimens too btw… The emphasis on waiting and not doing stuff was what was getting on my nerves…

Like I said earlier in my recent post a purity culture I don’t know, some of the critiques to ‘evangelical purity culture’ I’ve seen lately are describing something I don’t recognise at all, but I did have my concerns with what I did see. If I would have encountered weirdos like the 2 creeps in Sarah Moons latest blogpost my concerns would’ve been a lot bigger. And it might be that I didn’t even register some of the things that didn’t make sense to me, I think that’s how I never picked up those gender roles in Harris’ book if they are there. my brain didn’t even notice them because they made no sense to me, and they got thrown with the ‘this is too American’** garbage bin.

(Remember that an ‘American writer’ for me is as distant and exotic as an Italian cardinal, and Indian Sadhu  or an African Touareg songwriter…)

The whole movement always was a bit too obsessed with sex for my taste. (an obsession with having no sex all the time is just a weird form of sex-obsession.) It seemed like all they wanted to talk about was how to not have sex, and that was not what I was looking for, I was looking for how to actually grow in my relationship in all kinds of areas. All that talk about what not to do is not good for building a relationship. what people need is positive advice about to grow in love, and not just sexually!!!! there’s much more to a relationship than that, and focussing a relationship on that will make it unbalanced, be it a relationship focussed solely on sex or one focussed solely on avoiding sex …

One of the things I probably dismissed as otherworldy nonsense was the idea of ‘never being alone with someone of the other sex’, including the one you’re not yet married to but having a relationship with. As someone who had been always single with a lot of female friends some of which I saw alone regularly such things just didn’t make sense and didn’t get registered in my brain. It was not something that could convince me anymore than the idea that Belgium does not exist… (It would never haver worked with me and my wife either)

Another point that I found troubling was that I did not see how filling people with a ‘no sex’ message and conditioning them all the time to not touch and not be intimate would ever be reversed on a wedding night. I was too realistic to believe such a thing, whatever promises of ‘great sex lives for those who wait’ were gives. I just didn’t see that happen with such an obsessive attitude. And I later read a lot of articles that affirmed, sometimes from people who were completely blocked down sexually, so it wasn’t a false concern… I know it did work for other people, but I who was already blocked on sex and completely turned off by a world around me that seemed to sell sex on every corner but no love was more traumatised about sex on that moment. And in need of simple honest not overly sexual intimacy. It would actually take years of very slowly growing in intimacy before I would even be ready for sex and by that time I’d be ready to get married too.

By the way, there is something really problematic about all the weirdness this kind of movements does attach to the Christian ideas about sex and marriage. There is something dangerous about a good idea or a truth being hijacked by people who exaggerate in preaching it, and lump it together with nonsense and worse… It might work as a really good vaccination to ever believe it again. Those preached to who are first convinced but later see that the ballast is nonsense will most likely throw away the child with the bathwater… (an example of that here)
See also Ken Ham and his weird form of young earth creationism as litmus test for Christianity…

But let’s close with what I think is important about true love: it loves! And loving is not about not doing things, but about doing things. Apophatic theology (saying things about God by saying what He is not) can be an interesting way to communicate truth about God, but not doing certain things is not the essence of any form of love, and if it is you’re distracted from the real thing…

peace

Bram

* There was something sarcastic in that name, mainly the ‘irrestistible’ part… I’ve been single and eh, extremely celibate until I was 22 or so.

** Nothing racist about that. Other cultures always have things that are found to be nonsense and irrelevant by outsiders. But I do think I can indeed say that ‘too American’ is a valid reason for a lot of Europeans to  dismiss something…

Bram Cools : ‘Noisetrade essential songs sampler’ now available for free download!

The list of ‘essential Bram Cools songs for dummies‘ that I’ve posted a while ago is now available for free download (unless you want to pay, that’s possible too) on noisetrade:

You can listen and get it here

Tracklist for the ‘Bram Cools Noistrade essential songs’ sampler:

    1. Coca cola
    2. Father I’m tired
    3. Unfair competition
    4. Qualities
    5. Key
    6. Doos vol cornflakes
    7. I’m not flirting
    8. Praise the Lord
    9. Nettle fields
    10. Consumer’s delight
    11. Albatross (indie-folk mix)
    12. The chosen one
    13. My old name (original tape mix)

(And yes, the artwork is loosely based on the first verse of the first song, but those were aliens that did come over to paint circles (and more) in the fields, not just to drink coca-cola)

enjoy

Bram

Bram Cools music for dummies: some essential songs

My Bram Cools music project might be on a hiatus at the moment for the live-music part, but in between a lot of other things he’s still working on making more of his music available and finally finishing some recordings. From lo-fi to experiment, and from protest-songs to weird instrumentals or raw psalms, with everything in between except for coloring in the lines of professionalism or recording something that would sell to a wide audience…

For those unfamiliar with the music of Bram Cools who get lost in all those weird names of songs, albums and EP’s on the current bandcamp site we have made a list of ‘essential’ songs, ranging from the time of crappy tapes to now. (This is not a definitve list, ask another day and you might get a complete different list…) The most of these songs are from the compilation I am the Belgian Christian lo-fi scene  which is some kind oof best-of album, and the more recent electronic full-album cyberluddism

Both albums, and all other albums and songs, can be downloaded for a chosen price or for free on bandcamp. Together they would form some kind of best-of album…

the songs:

my old name:
This might not be the oldest song available here, but it surely is the oldest recording. A quiet lo-fi folk song recorded on one take on a cassette tape, probably somewhere around 2000, and the only song of that era that still gets played live regularly.

coca cola:
This one is actually from Brams teenage years, but it has never been recorded until it was re-recorded a few years ago for the ‘I am the Belgium Christian lo-fi scene’, to become almost radio-friendly…

father I am tired:
One of the fist examples of multitrack-madness, and a live favorite of the Contemporary Christian Muzak collective. It is in no way a very conventional song, but it seems to be one of the most popular Bram Cools songs nonetheless.

unfair competition:
A song about the way iin which we view women, dedicated to the late Marilyn Monroe, that used to be a live favorite. Here is the original version, an arrangement that has never been played live with some primitive guitar solos. An electronic remix of the song can be found on cyberluddism too.

qualities:
Another one of those examples of multitrack  madness, resulting in baroque lo-fi indiefolk. Also a live favorite of the CCM collective, and the first Bram Cools composition that was written in 5/8.

key:
Basically a simple indiefolk song with some weird synth thrown in, but it seems like a lot of people like this one.

doos vol cornflakes:
Yes, a song in dutch with as title ‘box full of cereal’, with a weird half-electronic arrangment. The parrallels with the ancient book of Job were not intended.

I’m not flirting:
Revisting teenage loneliness with strange backwards drumsamples, and 2 and a half repetitive guitar chords and a broken accordian.

praise the Lord:
In 2007 I recorded a record in one moth for the RPM challenge, based on old liturgical texts, resulting in a weird mix of styles and languages. This one is a psalm which got caught in a 5/8 avanthop kind of thing, and is probably the only time I really got to rapping.

nettle fields:
‘Cyberluddism’ was the next real full album, and a department from folky sounds, with a lot of electronics, soundscapes and a topical exploration of our technological society. Nettle fields has a dark eigthies-feel mixed with some guitarnoise in the background and a lot of postmodern confusion.

consumer’s delight:
This song from ‘cyberluddism’ is the most listened Bram Cools song on bandcamp. An agressive noisy electronic punksong arranged with gameboy-sounds and very primitive beats.

albatross:
Originally a folk song, but it appeared on ‘cyberluddism’ in a dance-mix. Later an indiefolk-version appeared together with 3 other mixes (a trance version, a slowed down triphop version and some unnamed electronic mix) on a remix-single.

the chosen one:
The most recent one in the list, some years old but finished and released in 2013 as a 2-song single together with the dark ‘byte of my byte, pixel of my pixel’. A hint of electro, classic rock and some kind of poppy electro, and the tragic tale of a failed hero.

2 new Bram Cools songs

I haven’t been playing music for ages it seems, which has something to do with a small baby and stuff like that. But listening to old recordings I decided it is time to finish a lot of almost-finished and half-finished songs before making new ones… Which led to the bandcamp release of 2 songs I’ve been working on since forever… They’re not my usual style (if such a thing exists) so I just bundled them into a two-song single.

The first song is some dark metal-without-the-metal thingy about the way in wich images of women are used in our digital country. The second one is an electronic rock tune about a failed postmodern savior. At one moment I thought about including those 2 songs in my cyberluddism album, but they didn’t fit…

Both songs can be listened and downloaded here on my bandcamp.

byte of my byte, pixel of my pixel

softly spoken to my eyes
images of naked flesh they tell intimate lies
how could I want her if she’s not mine
how could I want her If she doesn’t even exist
how could I want her

and this game will always go on
in this world Venus is just a slave of Mammon
how do I fight against those evil gods
oh lust in the eye only also is adultery yes it is

softly spoken these intimate lies
could I just not turn away my eyes
why should I look at her if she’s not mine
why should I look at her if she doesn’t even exist
why should I look

and this game will always go on
in this world Venus is just a slave of Mammon
how do I fight against those evil gods
oh lust in the eye only also is adultery it is
oh beautiful re-creation oh sweet deception
byte of my byte and pixel of my pixel

The chosen one

Am I the chosen one
who’s gonna save the world
am I the chosen one
from the ancient prophecy
they all told me that I was the one
they all believe will deliver
they all see something that I’m not
And I’m here face to face with evil

I’m just a pointless stupid postmodern guy
on opium for the people I’ve always been so high
distraction much more pointless than the most deformed religion
I’ve wasted my whole life and now I’m ready for nothing
the great nothing

I’m not chosen one
that was gonna save the world
I was not the chosen one
from their stupid prophecy
they still think  that I was the one to save them from evil
they still believe that I will deliver the way their fairy tales told them
but here I’m being  torn into pieces
it wasn’t me they needed to fight this evil

I was just a pointless stupid postmodern idiot
I didn’t learn a thing, I cannot use their stupid magical sword
and now the world must end, and evil will take over forever
I’ve wasted the world  I wasn’t ready for nothing

should I’ve been the chosen one
that could’ve saved the world

enjoy

Bram

“Father I feel”, or cyndi McCoy playing “Father I’m tired”

When you make songs you also create the possibility for people to play them themselves and do their own thing with it. This is a beautiful rendition of “Father I’m tired” by Cyndi McCoy:

Enjoy!

Bram

Musical interlude: Step into the madness (Larry Norman)

I was listening to the grandfather of christian rock lately, and I found this song about his homeland quite scary, and parts of it might be as relevant as they were when the song was released in 1991…

I must say that I do disagree with a lot of Larry’s theology, and that some of his ideas can be quite weird from time to time, but on other moments he can be incredible spot on, like in this song…

Step into the madness of a million city streets
Where dealers sell white powder and children stand and bleed
Where local gangs are vicious and cops are so impure
That schoolboys carry Uzis so they’ll feel secure.

Where fathers rape their daughters and beat up on their sons
Until the mother tries to stop him and goes and buys a gun
Where the local church is closed except a couple times a week
And turns its face from all the homeless in the street.

This is America, land of the free
Everyone gets justice and liberty, if you got the money.

Bankers and controllers make deals on foreign shores
And the CIA ships heroin to finance their secret wars
They sell the madmen weapons then send soldiers to their land
And in the name of God we battle for all the oil under the sand.

This is America, land of the free
Everyone gets justice and liberty, if you got the money.

Step into the madness as a thousand points of light
Illuminate the warheads for the final fight.
Step into the madness, say your prayers and drink your tea
Get ready for a kinder, gentler world war three.

This is America, land of the free
Everyone gets justice and liberty, if you got the money.

‘Sketches for a liturgy’ available again!

And now some news from the Bram Cools music front. For those who don’t know, I do make music, but not everyone is going to like it since it’s a bit rough and weird sometimes… (Listen to an older compilation called ‘I am the Belgian Christian lo-fi scene’ for example to get an idea…)

Years ago, in 2007, I took the RPM challenge, and recorded an album in a month (februari even, the shortest)! It don’t think it’ll ever reach the top-40 though (none of my music ever will I’m afraid…) since it was a weird, raw, lo-fi and not very professional concept album loosely based on the classical liturgies. It had all kind of weird musical styles, and was sung in a lot of different languages (Dutch, English, Latin, Greek, 2 words of Hebrew and one word of French) There was an electronic repetitive Kyrië, an avant-hop psalm of praise (in 5/8 meter), a lo-fi folk self-written creed, etc…

I made some home-’pressed’ CD-R’s’ at the time, but they have been ‘out of print’ since forever, and the music has been unavailable for quite some years now… I never even dared to listen to it because I was afraid that I’d hate it for being rcorded too hastily, and since I lost the tracks in a computer crash, I’d never been able to rework them again either.

Listening again years later I don’t find it that bad, so I decided to make it available again, with some songs slightly remastered.

And the re-release is… Tararara…

NOW!

From now on it can be downloaded via the ‘Gloria in Te Domine‘ bandcamp site, where I want to share my more ‘religious’-minded music (like worship, praise, gospel, meditative and liturgical stuff, if I’d ever be able to play such stuff….) You can get it for free or choose to pay for it if you like… And if you like soundcloud more, you can also find it here.

Tracklist for Bram Cools – sketches for a liturgy:

1. Bienvenue

2. Lorica

3. Kyrië

4. Agnus Dei

5. Beautitudes

6. Sanctus

7. Three-in-one

8. Praise the Lord

9. I believe

10. Onze Vader

11. The great commandment

12. Shalom

13. Amen

So you can all download the album in the format you like for free or for the price you like …. If you want to use them and need chords or lyrics or so, please contact me…

Anyone who likes any of the songs?

shalom

Bram

musical interlude: dissapointed in the sun (dEUS)

When I was a teenager, I didn’t try much to rebel with music at first. As a young teenager I kinda liked the music my parents were listening (a CD collection that included U2 and Bob Dylan) and I always tried to find decent music on the radio, which was harder than it seemed, since the commercial radio here in Belgium in the nineties seemed to mostly play euro-house and boysbands at that time. every rocksong, every song with  real instruments even, was a pearl between the trash for me…

Later on I got more interested in ‘alternative’ music, and one of the biggest names in althernative music at the moment here in Belgium was dEUS, a then quite weird band from Antwerp. Rock’n roll and arty-fart weirdness went together with strange sounds and a lot of different musical styles that were mangled together. Their biggest hits are songs like suds and soda, roses, and theme from turnpike, which are very unlikely hits, but even now they still have 4 songs of that era in the timeless list of stubru, the alternative radio station. The first albums ‘worst case scenario’ and ‘in a bar, under the sea’ remain unique and unlike anything I’ve ever heard before or afterwards.

They still make music, but for me thy lost most of the vibe around the time of their third album, and became a more regular band afterwards. Which does not mean that their later hit ‘nothing really ends‘ is not a good candidate for the best slow ever written in Belgium.

Todays song is a title-song in disguise, for their second album ‘in a bar, under the sea’. Unlike most songs on the album it’s not experimental or weird, and neither are the lyrics completely weird and cryptic. It’s a song about escapism, running away from all life’s problems in a bar under the sea.  It is alleged to be inspired by Captain Beefheart who commented after visiting an exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh, remarked that he was disappointed in the sun.

dissapointed in the sun (written by Tom Barman and Piet Jorens)

Who could tell the story better
About the things that I went through
Some were great but most were terrifying
And so spooky too

Had to get out of there, to hide away
Had to get out of there, to find my way
I troubled everything too soon
Now where I want to be is…

Need I say my only wish was
To escape my earthly life
High skies were no option whereas
Diving deep in oceans wide

Was the way for me, to hide away
A possibility, to leave today
I troubled everything too soon
Now where I want to be is…

Under the sea, is where I’ll be
No talking ’bout the rain no more
I wonder what thunder will mean, when only in my dream
The lightning comes before the roar

Circumstancial situations, now I know what people meant
Beware of the implications, God I’ve had enough of them

Decided to be brave and hide away
Just picking out a wave and slide away
I troubled everything too soon
Now where I want to be is…

Maybe taking it another hour then taking away the pain
I troubled everything too soon, now where I want to be is…

Under the sea, is where I’ll be
No talking ’bout the rain no more
I wonder what thunder will mean, when only in my dream
The lightning comes before the roar
Under the sea, down here with me I find I’m not the only one
Who ponders what life would mean if we hadn’t been
So disappointed in the sun

And that’s why we’re thinking,
That’s why we’re drinking in a bar under the sea

enjoy

Bram

PS: more about Belgian music can be found here, in this post about the Gorky song ‘Mia’ which some have considered the best song ever.