Track Tales: schroothoop - MACADAM (Sdban Ultra 2023.)
Track Tales is a new section of the site where artists present their songs through short stories regarding them.
My new guests in this column are the members of the Belgian group schroothoop. Already their name ('junkyard") says a lot about the principle of their work. Namely, schroothoop plays on instruments made from junk. The junk jazz trio finds inspiration in traditional Afro-Cuban and North African rhythms, New Orleans second line grooves and Arabic hijaz scales. Today they released their new album called "MACADAM" for Sdban Records, and for Izvorišta they write about every single song on the album.
Imagine Don Quichote on a quest to the recycling park. His loyal horse is galloping through the city at a trippy 5/8 pace. Dodging all the scrap metal along the way, the horse won’t give up. We kind of felt like that horse when recording this song. None of us are trained guitar players, so we had a hard time keeping the tempo on Rik’s newly built ukelele (made out of an old biscuit tin). That’s why this song sounds a bit like a drunken horse.
Brussels has a large and flourishing Moroccan community and you can often hear traditional gnawa and chaabi music in the streets from car speakers and wedding orchestras passing by. Rik has collaborated with several Moroccan musicians and introduced these genres in schroothoop. In this song we were particularly inspired by the krakeb, a castanet-like rhythm instrument that keeps you in an endless trance. Our homemade krakebs are made of pieces of wood, crown caps and plastic bottles. The bells in the end are coffee cans (organic bean coffee of course). You can also hear Rik flying high during a solo on nothing but a balloon.
One of our weirdest songs, combining styles that usually stay far away from each other like dub and country. This song made us think of an old car, slowly driving its last miles before crashing into a sinkhole in the middle of the road, causing a huge traffic jam without caring too much. The lyre deserves a special mention here, made from fish wires and a wooden crate.
A beautiful sounding synonym for a street. This song feels like a slow march through the streets of Brussels, a city with a lot of illegally dumped garbage. The whole song is based on a cimbalom riff. It was a tricky instrument to make and to amplify, because all eight strings of the cimbalom have their own sound box (tin cans). So the sound is coming from eight different sources.
One day at a rehearsal we started playing some pumping kuduro rhythms, but then slowed it down and found ourselves in a peaceful, ambient world full of plastic roses. Just like the wonderful Belgian songwriter and performer Guido Belcanto. He sings about “plastic roses that never wither, like my love for you”. So yeah this is definitely our most romantic song, and we love Guido Belcanto.
Remember the vuvuzela? A very loud, plastic, trumpet-like instrument used by football fans during the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, and afterwards pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Not much later, people got tired of the slightly annoying sound and started abandoning their vuvuzelas. Luckily for Rik, who found an orphan vuvuzela, drilled some holes in it and experimented with blowing melodies instead of noise. We matched it with New Orleans second line grooves and a cheerful, bubbly thumb piano, to evoke an underwater jellyfish parade. And because Belgium’s third official language is German, we called it Tanz Der Quallen.
This song started when we used a violin bow to play on our washtub bass, and a low, dark buzz emerged. It was an exciting sound. We wanted to create a danceable song with it, but didn’t know which genre would fit best. Rik started playing Algerian Raï-melodies on the flutes, while Margo went for Afro-Cuban Cascara-patterns on the drums. This strange mix of styles worked pretty well and we called it the Cascaraï.
Our drummer Margo just got a newborn when we created this song. Her daughter is cute and all, but at that time her kid was passing on a lot of childhood diseases to Margo. Many of them have funny names in Dutch (our native language). Krentenbaard means beard of raisins, which sounds delicious but is actually a very contagious bacterial skin infection, haha. Anyway, you can hear Margo being sick in the first part of the song, and fully recovered in the second part, dancing wildly around a campfire with her daughter.
A lot of sounds, instruments and trash we recorded didn’t fit in any other schroothoop song, so we blended them together in this ambient sample experiment. Unlike our other songs, which are all recorded live, this one is composed entirely on computer using ‘field recordings’ of rehearsals and residencies. You might hear an old bike wheel turning slowly around its axle, a shopping cart, PVC tube horns, grinding wheels and objects we already forgot what they used to be.
Slow intro, but quickly turns into a party! “Broeihaard” literally means a breeding ground for microbes in Dutch. We indeed wrote this song during the pandemic.
We employed the natural frequency of grinding wheels and metal bars to add a unique layer to the song and dipped these objects into water to get strange frequency modulation effects.
