The Flemish Primitives. That's a good name for a band, though it's already been used. The backing band of Kamagurka was also called De Vlaamse Primitieven. They played a kind of Dogbowl-like art-punk, a bit like Pere Ubu.
This De Vlaamse Primitieven is cut from a different cloth. It’s the name that Jan Boudart and Freek Vreys use for their Flemish take on American Primitive, a music genre named in the late 1950s by John Fahey for instrumental, folk-based, mostly acoustic guitar music. However, what Boudart and Vreys are doing also draws on what was released in the early to mid-2000s here in Flanders on labels like Funeral Folk and Kraak. Think of the psych-jam collective Silvester Anfang and its offshoots like Ignatz, Hellvete, and Edgar Wappenhalter. Back then, this kind of music was jokingly called Brol, referring to lo-fi recorded instrumental psychedelic folk improvisations. This style was also being played in the US by bands like Sunburned Hand of the Man or Jackie-O Motherfucker, or in Finland by groups like Avarus and Kemialliset Ystävät, though De Vlaamse Primitieven clearly puts its own stamp on the genre. After all, these are musicians who graduated from the Antwerp Conservatory, jazz department.
"Lucht van een andere planeet" (Air from Another Planet) is a fine showcase of all the aforementioned styles. The album comes in a sleeve designed by Antwerp's most playful artist, Dennis Tyfus, and is released by the New York-based Carbon label. It contains five mostly long pieces of music, navigating between improvisation and composition, playful and serious at the same time, focused yet off-the-cuff. It has something hypnotic and shamanistic, something medieval even. Something ritualistic. You can imagine candles and old carpets. You stop thinking and let yourself be carried away by the music itself – that's the best way to grasp it.
De Vlaamse Primitieven is one of the frontrunners of a new kind of improvisation-based instrumental Flemish folk, alongside bands like De Regering van Treffelijke Zaken and Rivercrest, and acts like Venediktos Tempelloom or Ishtembashtock. You might call it the new Flemish Primitivism – all beautiful and interesting 'old music' approached in a fresh way.