"When the train is coming through, you better get on board." So says José Pascual, of Antwerp's USA Import shop, in The Sound of Belgium, a fascinating 2012 documentary about the country's remarkable club scene—or scenes, really, going all the way back to the "mirror balls" of the post-war years, with their punchcard-controlled organs. He's talking specifically about the boom mentality that accompanied New Beat, an electronic-music craze that gripped the nation in the years between 1986 and 1989.
The sound of New Beat is relatively easy to describe. A homegrown strain that borrowed from new wave, EBM, and Chicago acid, it was dark, menacing, sensually severe, and distinguished largely by its torpid chug of a pulse. New Beat stemmed, in part, from Belgian DJs' propensity to play records at the wrong speed. The genre's foundational track is said to be A Split-Second's 1986 single "Flesh", played at 33 RPM instead of 45. (Incredibly, this turns out not to have been an entirely new concept: Belgian DJs pioneered the technique in the so-called "Popcorn" scene of the 1970s, playing obscure American soul 45s from the 1950s and '60s at 33 RPM, pitched up to +8. The result was to make the songs sound deeper, fuller, and just a little bit off, but not exaggeratedly so—disorienting, but not distorted.)
Adherents of the movement describe New Beat's effects in rapturous terms. It was slow enough that you could dance to it all night without tiring, and without drugs (although drugs, we can assume, were definitely a part of the mix). The bass did weird things at slower tempos, its frequencies greasy and swollen; spine-tingling electronic timbres and undulating acid lines added to the music's hypnotic properties. In the film, Renaat Vandepapeliere, founder of the R&S label, describes the Boccaccio, a Belgian nightclub that served as the high temple of New Beat, as "a dark inferno… a slowed-down movie." The veteran Dutch DJ Eddy De Clercq says of the club, "It was cramped and eerie. But that's what the DJ was looking for—this uncomfortable, grisly atmosphere."
New Beat was an underground phenomenon in the sense that commercial radio wouldn't touch it, but it was wildly successful. Money flooded the scene; anything with "New Beat" stamped on the cover would sell, and sell in astonishing numbers. Even ho-hum singles could shift 30,000 copies—no small feat for a country of 10 million. (In adjusted terms, in the United States—which then had a population of 244 million—that would equate to selling 782,000 copies.) Popular singles were moving as many as 60,000 units, equivalent to platinum certification in the United States, all without any commercial airplay. "Bands" like Erotic Dissidents, whose performance consisted entirely of lip-synching, earned the equivalent of 1000 euros for 20 minutes on stage. With those kinds of numbers in play, producers with no connection to the underground club scene began to churn out New Beat. It was easy to make, after all; all you needed was a synthesizer and a drum machine. (Having even a modicum of musical theory gave you a vast advantage over most of your competition.) As the frenzy built up steam, it came to resemble the Dutch tulip mania 350 years prior. As one producer tells the filmmakers, "We had to act fast, because we knew it wouldn't last. It was much too unreal."
Rembert De Smet doesn't appear in The Sound of Belgium, but he was one of New Beat's fellow travelers. Even the press release for a new anthology of his work paints the former new waver (and eventual flamenco guitarist) as something of a bandwagon-jumper: "Producing without a pause and getting the music out the week after was the plan, as one knew that this lucrative era wouldn't last forever." In the early and mid '80s, De Smet was a member of the duo 2 Belgen ("2 Belgians"), a synth-pop act that found reasonable success at home but never broke internationally. As the new style took off, however, he adopted the name Ro Maron and began releasing New Beat tracks under a dizzying array of further aliases, both solo and in collaboration with producers like Ferre Baelen and Jean-Lou Nowé. Collected #1 gathers the work of 20 of those assorted aliases—acts like Zsa Zsa LaBoum, Air of Gloom, Kaos 007, 2 Body's (sic), Trance Trax, Beat Beat Beat—the bulk of which was recorded between 1988 and 1990.
If you're familiar with EBM and early acid house, the tropes here won't be entirely unfamiliar. Track after track is built out of brittle drum-machine programming and squelchy, rubbery acid sequences. Handclaps claw through clammy reverb like fingers scrabbling against moss-slicked dungeon walls, and the programmed drum beats lurch with zombie-like stiffness (a sensation heightened by drill-sergeant chants of "Left, right, left, right, left, right, left!" that kick off the very second song). The music is for the most part instrumental: there are no lyrics, just sampled mantras repeated ad nauseam ("Welcome to my acid house," "Gimme some acid," "A la recherché du temps perdue," etc.), and chemical mischief bubbles to the surface in songs like "Brainkiller", which cribs its bassline from "White Lines" and mutters about "pleasure area[s] in the brain."
At 35 tracks and three hours long, it's an enormous amount of material to wrap one's head around, but a lot of it turns out to be pretty great. The gnarled acid and wet-cardboard kick drum of 2 Body's "Body Drill" wouldn't be out of place on the L.I.E.S. label today. SM's "SM", with its sampled yelps and fidgety, chromatic arpeggios, balances industrial grit with the more playful funk of contemporary groups like Colourbox. Sleepwalker's "All Jazz" features a killer squarewave bass line that anticipates Biosphere's "Novelty Waves". Those kinds of reference points are all over the collection, a reminder that while he may have been an outsider and an opportunist, De Smet's work was deeply enmeshed in a dance-music tradition that stretches backwards and forwards across generations. I don't think it would be a stretch to call him a pioneer: he may not have invented the acid techniques and rhythmic tropes that pepper his music, but his work overflows with vision and unique character.
Even on the most pro-forma genre studies, like Sleepwalker's proto-deep-house "Sleepwalker", there's something about the odd proportions—the synthesized sax line that's just a little bit too loud; the vocal line that sounds better suited for a Factory release—that distinguishes it from its peers. "Cute Acid" is another one that grabs your attention for the way it conjures a kind of temporal Uncanny Valley: if you heard it in a nightclub, you'd be hard-pressed to say whether it was a vintage cut or a brand-new production. It vaguely reminds me of Bradley's Robot, a record Aphex Twin released under the Bradley Strider alias in 1993, but its nimble percussion, bright colors, and birdsong timbres—the title "Cute Acid" was certainly well chosen—sound unlike anything I've heard before.
The Sound of Belgium's filmmakers make a good case that New Beat deserves more attention than it has received until now. The genre's main components may have been invented in Chicago and Detroit, but New Beat came so close on their heels that the genre should be seen less as a mere imitation of African-American electronic music, and more a crucial node in a conversation that bounced back and forth across oceans and borders. (Many riffs from New Beat and early Belgian rave music would become staples of the U.K.'s breakbeat hardcore.) From a contemporary perspective, it's clear that De Smet's work, as commercially motivated as it may have been, helped expand the possibilities for this eerie, not-quite-underground music on the cusp of conquering the world. The history of dance music is full of missing pieces, and Collected #1 offers up 35 of them. It's a mixed bag, but sorting through the remnants is a blast.
