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Belgium

New beat's Belgian ringleader

Praga Khan

Maurice Engelen, working as Praga Khan, helped invent Belgium's new beat sound in Antwerp province in the mid-1980s and co-founded Antler-Subway, the label that drove the scene. He recorded under a rotating cast of aliases (Channel X, Digital Orgasm, The Immortals and more), and the catalog runs from club tracks used in Basic Instinct to the Mortal Kombat video game score. Under his own name he also recorded with vocalist Nikkie Van Lierop, his collaborator in Lords of Acid. Later he sat as a judge on Belgium's X Factor, a long way from Antwerp's new beat clubs.

Belgium's guitar loner

Ignatz

Ignatz is the solo project of Bram Devens, a former comic-book art student who moved to sparse, mostly improvised songs for voice and acoustic guitar, sung phonetically in English, which isn't his first language. Critics have reached for the Velvet Underground's louche primitivism and for Nick Drake, though neither comparison quite gets across how minimal the records are. He spent fourteen years in Brussels before moving to the small town of Landen around 2012, and he's said the move made his recent work calmer and more relaxed. Two decades in, he keeps releasing on small labels in Belgium, Finland and the US, largely on his own hermetic terms.

An American co-founder of Tuxedomoon

Blaine L. Reininger

Blaine L. Reininger co-founded Tuxedomoon in San Francisco in 1977 with Steven Brown; the two had met in an electronic-music class. On a European tour in 1980 the band was evicted from a converted water-treatment plant in Rotterdam for their neighbors' comfort. Around the same time, choreographer Maurice Béjart offered them a commission to score a ballet about Greta Garbo. Between the two, the whole band ended up moving south to Brussels, where Reininger stayed based for eighteen years. He left Tuxedomoon briefly for a solo career on the Brussels label Les Disques du Crépuscule and rejoined for good in 1988. Decades later he's still composing and touring, now mostly from Greece.

Belgian new beat's loudest export

Lords of Acid

Lords of Acid formed in 1988 around Praga Khan, Oliver Adams and vocalist Nikkie Van Lierop (performing as Jade 4U), and made records explicit enough that critics have joked almost none of it could air on American radio, even edited. Their debut album, Lust, came out in 1991 on Antler-Subway, became a club and college-radio fixture, and put the band on the US dance chart. The 1994 follow-up, Voodoo-U, ran into actual censorship. Its cover art, nude orange-colored figures by hot-rod artist Coop, was pulled from more than half of American record stores, and the major chains got a tamer alternate sleeve instead.

Twin brothers, a Casio, a cassette

Vita Noctis

Vita Noctis started in 1981 in Vilvoorde, just north of Brussels: twin brothers Kris and Jos Kips plus Kris's girlfriend Martine Genijn, recording at home with a Roland drum machine, a bass and a Casio keyboard. Their self-released 1984 cassette, In the Face of… Death, deals with mortality and religion in a voice that goes from whisper to scream, and it sits closer to early Sheffield electronics than to their Belgian coldwave peers. Then the band went quiet for decades. A 2012 reissue of their old cassette tapes brought them back together, and they made new recordings for the first time since the 1980s.

A Belgian radio show turned band

Liaisons D

Liaisons D took its name from a radio show run by Sven Van Hees and Paul Ward, who turned the show into a recording act at the tail end of Belgium's new beat years. Producer Frank De Wulf, among others, joined later. The early catalog even overlapped with Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the future KLF, who co-wrote material the act released in 1989. The music has since turned up in unexpected places, and decades later the American band The Grifters sampled it.

New beat's woman of a thousand names

Jade 4U

Jade 4U was one of the many stage names of Nikkie Van Lierop, a German-born Belgian singer and producer who spent the new beat years releasing under a small army of pseudonyms: Darling Nikkie, Max RedStone, Miss Lie, Zsa Zsa Deluxe and others. That was common in a scene where anonymity let a handful of studios flood the market without any one name looking oversaturated. Jade 4U debuted with 1988's Jade's Dream on the small Belgian label Integrity, then moved to the French label Vogue for 1989's The Queen of New Beat and a run of singles. Van Lierop worked in the same Antler-Subway orbit as Praga Khan, Dirty Harry and Chris Inger, all commissioned to keep the young label's catalog growing. The same year Jade 4U's debut appeared, she also co-founded Lords of Acid with Praga Khan. That project would eventually make her voice far better known than any of her pseudonyms, though not her name.

The Collection