“Souvenirs van de Woeste Grond“ (roughly translates as “Souvenirs from the Wasteland”) is a part of a landscape-inspired art project inspired by the Dutch province “Overijssel”.
“In this project two artists (Heidi Linck and Hans Jungerius) collected stories about the countryside landscape in order to save them from obscurity. In the second phase of the project eight different artists make a souvenir based on the collected stories.”
This particular album (available as digital download or limited edition CD released by the adventurous Esc.Rec label), is one of those ‘souvenirs’!
Thematically – ánd musically – there’s a clear relation to “Herfsttonen“, a 2010 release dedicated to a village (Okkenbroek) in about the same part of Holland.
For “Souvenirs van de Woeste Grond“, label curator Harco Rutgers invited artists to create a composition based on the stories collected by Heidi Linck about Losser and it’s surroundings.
With the exception of Gareth Davis (presenting “Stone” – the longest track with the darkest atmosphere of this album), all artists are Dutch: Gluid (“Sound” without the first vowel: “Sund”), Machinefabriek, Wouter van Veldhoven, Reinier van Houdt and Weerthof have taken the stories and sounds of the Losser surroundings as the starting points of their compositions.
Taken away from the cultural context of this particular project, their rather abstract yet also ‘natural’ soundcapes still stand firm and deserve to be widely heard outside Overijssel (and Holland) too!
Wherever you may live, I guess there will always be some (disappearing and almost forgotten) wasteland stories that these tracks could be the perfect soundtrack to.
By the way: If you can read Dutch, check souvenirsvandewoestegrond.nl for all the details and background stories to this remarkable project.
