Het Zweet

Genre: ELECTRONIC

2LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

As vital and foundational as they come, Het Zweet’s transfixing self-titled ’83 tape barrage of screwed industrial voices, polyrhythms and atonalities marks Athenian labels UNTAG and Heat Crimes’ second foray into the past after sweeping a butterfly net across the modern DIY scene in recent years - big big RIYL Bryn Jones, Zoviet France, Robert Turman, Spencer Clark & James Ferraro’s primordial gunk as The Skaters...✨

‘Het Zweet’ is an early testament to the bloody-minded focus and mesmerising momentum conjured by Marien Van Oers of Breda, the Netherlands, 1983-1988. Not to be confused with his 1987 LP of the same name, this early hour in his company pays witness to a man possessed by the potential of tape loops combined with live drumming, tumping anything from cardboard tubes to shopping trolleys in his exhaustive efforts to run the voodoo down. 40 years later it stands as a totem to early post-industrial music’s DIY thrust away from punk and new wave conventions toward a more transcendent sound that triggered atavistic energies, and still endures due to its inexorable physical traction and sweltering, psychoactive detailing.

In 1983 Het Zweet was part of a loosely connected rhizome of musical imaginations who took the likes of Throbbing Gristle and punk’s prevailing license to make a racket and run with it, away from 3 chord rock ’n roll or transgressive poetry and detuned synths, instead instinctively focusing on fundamentals of repetitive, driving rhythm, harmonic texture and mantric, wordless vocals that spoke to intuitive concerns of the psyche and its harder to reach crevices.

In Het Zweet’s hands, physical variability meets a constant of tape loops and recorders in ways that, if you squint your ears a bit, can be heard as bridge between ancient religious rituals, the swingeing zonk of Muslimgauze, Z’EV or Zoviet France in the mid ‘80s, and the type of thunderous industrial techno that fuels ravers’ attempts to get outside themselves every weekend in the Western world right now. This first vinyl edition of Het Zweet’s earliest work inarguably catches that thrust in immense effect between the bestial churn of ‘Vocus’, the tumultuous, keening clatter of ‘Tribus’, a wraithlike stepper ‘Slindus’, and a convergence of powerfully hypnotic, elemental streams of consciousness in ‘Indus’, each spelt out long and uncompromising for optimal immersion.

Heat Crimes rightfully pace the work within contemporary DIY slipstreams of tradition that link the tonal pursuits of Robert Truman to Spencer Clark & James Ferraro’s primordial gunk as Skaters, whilst we could also add some of Hafler Trio’s percussive works and the longform churn of early Psychic Warriors of Gaia, or the way Whitehouse’s early fascinations with Congolese rhythms would later spur Cut Hands.

2LP (Black Vinyl) (4)