BE: "Made in Belgium!"

Ah Belgium! A country known for its beers, chips, waffles and chocolate as much as for its surrealism, its contribution to comics and its many well-known personalities in the fields of arts and entertainment, it is common knowledge that Belgium also cultivates a certain affinity for self-mockery, the frank laughs and the festive atmospheres... Some elements that could perhaps partly explain why this small Western European country has vibrated and continues to vibrate to the rhythm of an atypical electronic sound for which it has played, from its beginnings, and continues to play a key role in its development and expansion!

Let's then try here together to briefly summarize some of the possible reasons...

First clue perhaps, Belgium is a "young" country with a meteoric rise !!! As a reminder, created in 1830, the small "kingdom" of Belgium (under the unglamorous leadership of its colonizing and slave-owning monarchs...) embraced the strong world economic growth and industrial revolutions of the 19th century. It was even fairly quickly able to establish the first (and still the densest) railway network on the European continent. Moreover, it will see its development increased thanks to its densely populated and coal-rich territory. Cradle of technological advances in various fields, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, natural sciences, many disciplines were impacted by "black-yellow-red" discoveries! Ernest Solvay or the 1977Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry Ilya Prigogine are national emblems, but, for the record, it is probably the Ghent native Léo Baeckeland (Ghent, 1863 - New York, 1944) who contributed, without any premeditation, to bringing together the Belgians from the north and south of the country much later in the 1980s and 1990s.

For the record, Léo Baeckeland, it is this Belgian chemist who emigrated to the United States and developed, between 1907 & 1909, bakelite, a plastic material based on synthetic benzene polymers which contributed to the manufacture of many objects, including VINYL DISCS!

These same "phonographic" supports via which the whole of Belgium wiggled through the nights, thus bringing together, from the end of the 1980s, young people from the four corners of the country and even from neighbouring countries to the sound of basses, Flanked behind turntables connected to powerful sound systems, the DJs in sight at the time, true "masters of ritual ceremonies of a new kind", set fire to the dance floors of clubs and eclectic parties. Belgium then presented all the assets of a sort of "little Eldorado" conducive to the development and maturation of a booming movement! Large electronic masses were organised almost everywhere. The atmosphere was torrid, the climate "psychedelic..." Music as a common language, the "peace, love, tolerance & freedom" state of mind that prevailed there erased any form of animosity, even possible memories of "neighbourhood quarrels..." The diffusion of a techno music that is often "hardcore", "twilight" and thunderous as a "mode of communication..." As a matter of fact, a "hard", "dark", sometimes "gloomy", even relatively "aggressive" music in some respects (for the layman's ear...), does not spontaneously generate hostile behaviours... The vibration, its power and the sensations shared together were enough to put everyone on the same wavelength... Besides, the house scene, with a softer and "jovial" reputation, was not to be outdone, its more "festive" tone also met its audience. As for the radio scene, things were evolving timidly... Whatever the form, electro (TECHNO) was only supposed to be temporary... In short, it seems that a distant parallel can be drawn between, on the one hand, the plastic composition of a vinyl record on which pieces of electronic music have been printed with the intention of making people dance and, on the other hand, the socio-cultural context of a small piece of territory extraordinarily open to the world and folded in on itself at the same time...

Then, by chance of history or mysterious coincidence, the birthplace of the chemist who made his involuntary contribution to the vinyl record industry, Ghent occupies a prominent place in the family tree of ELECTRONiC MUSiC.

♥️ First of all, because the city was also the "base camp" of a major avant-garde label that produced an impressive number of the big names of the techno movement: R&S Records!

♥️ Secondly, the Ghent region is also known for its taste for partying and more particularly for having been home to one of the first mega-dancing events in Europe. Between 1986 and 1993, the famous 'Boccaccio' (Destelbergen, near Ghent) had become an international reference for revolutionary electronic music. The club was also considered by its regulars as the 'temple' of House Music, Acid House and the stealthy New-Beat!

If you look closely, the reality of the Belgian music scene meant that young people were ignoring political or identity issues in favour of sharing common festivities... And although the north and south of the territory delimit the border of what has been described as the "language barrier", music played its obvious role as a mediator! It is probably within the very heart of its capital Brussels (at the crossroads of two "cultures" and two regions, which has become the European capital...) and in its direct periphery that a major chapter in the development of the ELECTRO (TECHNO) movement will have been partly written.

As early as 1992 with the organisation "The Rave Explosion", a collective that was at the origin of memorable evenings that welcomed some of the biggest names in the booming techno genre, with the creation in 1994 of the Brussels nightclub the Fuse, Brussels and its surroundings wrote one of the most striking pages in the emancipation of electronic music.

The next chapter will probably be decisive and will be written between 2003 and the current period, 2020, in the Antwerp region (Boom): the Tomorrow Land festival is no longer to be presented...

Also, if the unifying and pacifying potential of electronic music is proven, then it is appropriate to consider the "Belgian soil" as a fertile breeding ground for the contemporary cultural mix... A soil where audacity and innovation go hand in hand, at least in terms of electronic festivities...

To be continued...