The newest addition to the Down The Line Collective is Bram Cools. Bram describes himself as an eclectic singer-songwriter from Belgium with lo-fi roots, somewhere in between weird folk, electro-acoustic noise and christian antifolk.
However you slice it, the man writes some killer tunes.
Since Bram is the newest addition, I thought a few questions would be in order to get to know Bram and see what makes him tick.
Bram, I’m really glad you are part of the Collective. I have really been enjoying your songs both musically and lyrically. One of your projects available on BandCamp is called I am the Belgian Christian lo-fi scene!. Besides being a great album is this a tongue-in-cheek title? Is there a Christian music scene at all in Belgium or in actuality are you the entire Christian music scene?
That’s a ‘best of’-compilation I made when I ran out of my older home-made CD-R’s, and it seemed a fitting title. It’s just a compilation of some of my best-liked songs of earlier times, with the addition of some weird instrumentals and sound experiments.
There surely isn’t a Christian lo-fi scene in Belgium, in the sense that no-one is playing lo-fi music with Christian influences deliberately… Belgium is a very secular post-catholic country with less than 2% Protestants and evangelicals, so the whole evangelical world is extremely small, but there is a very small Christian music scene although there’s not much bands on a professional level. Most Christian music is imported from the Netherlands though, where there’s a much bigger scene, or just straight from the US… Contemporary Christian Music is mostly heavily US-dominated anyway in this part of Europe.
Christian rock as a concept is completely unknown to most Belgians anyway, but on the other hand there are some more alternative Christian bands that are relatively popular in alternative circles, like 16 Horsepower and now Wovenhand, or Sufjan Stevens.
Who are your musical influences?
I’ve always listened to a lot of musical styles, and I seem to tend to blend a lot of influences together when I come up with my arrangements… But often there is a simple song underneath all the layers of multitrack and noise that can be easily played with voice and guitar, and those tend to be some kind of folky or dissonant rock tunes.
As a teenager I was a big fan of Bob Dylan and U2, as well as Nirvana and The Cranberries, and even Dire Straits as well as alternative Belgian bands like dEUS and Zita Swoon. Maybe I can add Larry Norman and 16 Horsepower to that too, but I don’t know if any real CCM band has influenced me that much in those years (maybe DC talk’s ‘Jesus freak’ that I listened to a lot as a teenager?) Later I discovered the worship-noise of the early Soul-Junk, and The Danielson Famile which did have a big impact on my music, as well as Sufjan Stevens, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros and Spinvis from Holland. I can also add Daniel Johnston, Portishead, the Innocence Mission, the Psalters, and Mewithoutyou. But honestly, I can’t say what influenced me most of the time, except in certain songs or parts of songs with a very peculiar influence.
You mention on your BandCamp page you are not in this to make money. What is your reason for making music?
I never thought of a reason, I just make music. If I would make music as part of some kind of plan to make money and get famous I would do something completely different… I am very well aware that neither my voice nor my style of music are fit for a general radio audience, and that’s not where I’m aiming at. I just like to make the music that I want to make, sometimes because there are things that I want to tell through the lyrics, sometimes because I want to experience with sounds or with chords and melodies.
And I’m always glad when I hear from people when they enjoy it or are touched by a certain song. Even with a small audience it seems like sometimes people are really touched, and I think that’s why I never stopped making music.
Your lyrics very blatantly come from a Christian perspective, do you consider your music an outreach or ministry?
I wouldn’t use those words, but it probably can be seen like that in a way. I am a Christian, even after years of struggling with what I believe in, and that’s a very important part of me that will come out when I write or perform songs. Music is always communicating something, and connecting to something, and something very personal to me, so I think it would be very strange if I would be able to hide something as important as my faith when I play music.
Some of my songs are worship or gospel songs, and I won’t hide that whoever is in the audience. So there might even be a ‘liturgical’ component to it that just comes naturally and that hasn’t been thought out.
I’ve seen a couple of pictures of you playing live, do you play live a lot? Do you play mostly for Christian or non-Christian audiences?
Not at the moment, but I hope to be playing live again more in the future. I stopped playing when my father unexpectedly died in February 2012, and I had already slowed down a lot because of the time that goes into work and a family with small kids, and because I don’t have much band members left at the moment.
Some years ago we had a band called the ‘Contemporary Christian Muzak Collective’ (CCMC) for the more experimental indie/noise worship-like songs. I think there are some really crude videos of our first show on YouTube. But then everybody did get kids and the didgeridoo-player moved to Sweden and everything fell apart…
One of my problems has always been how to translate my endless layers of multitrack to a live setting, be it with songs in which I play 10 layers of instrument or weird electronic experiments, so generally I end up with more stripped-down or more simple indie-rock live versions.
As for the audience I must say I generally like non-Christian or mixed audiences most. I’ve had some very bad experiences with playing with the CCM collective for Christian teenagers with a ‘here we are now, entertain us’ attitude that were not interested at all in our music. It seems that some Christians are just looking for safe entertainment, and not for something that has any kind of challenging content. And I’m not the person who can deliver such a thing…
For the gearheads out there, what is your recording setup?
Well, I started out with taped and minidisc and very lo-fi stuff, and have always tried to do as much with as less as possible… A laptop and a TASCAM recording device with some microphones are often all I use, sometimes borrowed mics to have a better effect.
The electronica of the more recent stuff is another story. I usually have the tendency to fool around on as much instruments as I can get my hands on even if I don’t really play them, but when we had our first baby, I didn’t have much chance to fool around with instruments, and so I started to experiment more with all kinds of electronic sounds that could just be done with the laptop and headphones, and I downloaded a lot of free VSTi’s of all kinds to experiment with, which ended up in the electronic sounds of ‘cyberluddism‘ and ‘Instant pocket apocalypse‘, but even here I couldn’t keep myself from going back to mixing real instruments into it wherever I could. But the orchestral sounds that you can here in ‘byte of my byte, pixel of my pixel‘ for example are just a free mellotron-imitating VSTi and the piano-roll of Linux multimedia studio…
You are very direct and sometimes seemingly personally very vulnerable lyrically, is that a conscious way of writing songs or is it just what comes out?
I don’t know, it generally just happens that way I think. There’s no plan behind it, but I think it’s just because I make the music that needs to come out sometimes…
Why sing in English?
That’s a good question. Probably the main reason is the Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the Western entertainment industry. English is the natural language of music and film here in Flanders even if it’s not our language. Tom Barman of the Belgian alternative rock band dEUS has said once that English is the language of rock’n roll, and 90% or so of the music on the radio is not in Dutch but in English over here in Flanders… The last 2 albums cyberluddism and the Instant Pocket Apocalypse EP were in English, but I do write and sing in Dutch or in the local Flemish dialect too – which differs a bit from standard Dutch as a spoken language, and I have even used liturgical Latin and Greek in the past. It’s even possible that I will make some songs in a self-invented language in the future. Two of my most-played and popular live songs are in Dutch (‘doos vol cornflakes‘ & ‘dood aan de graankorrel‘, both on I am the Belgian Christian lo-fi scene) and there’s a whole collection of songs in Flemish that I need to finish.
What’s up next?
There’s actually a lot of music that needs to be finished, and I hope to do some live shows again in the future, although I might have to find a band again too for that.
I need to finish an album I started recording years ago called Happy Christian music for the conservative middle class, which will have a BandCamp release. I also have a collection of almost finished songs from the ‘contemporary Christian muzak’ era that I want to release, as well as the beginning of an album that’s completely in Flemish.
Thanks again, do you have any parting words?
Thanks for being an audience. What I would say is that everyone should sing his or her own song. There’s only one person who can do it. Don’t be ashamed if it’s not what everybody wants to hear, and don’t just sing what you think everybody wants to hear, there really is enough of that already in the world. And don’t forget that we’re made in the image of the creator God, so it might be good to take our creativity serious…
You can listen to Bram’s music @ bramcools.bandcamp.com
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