I keep promising to tell the longer story, so here it is, or at least the shape of it. After the hardcore bands of our teenage years, a few of us ended up in Utrecht and started a band called We vs Death. What began as the same instinct as always, a few people in a room making noise, turned into something that took us most of the way around the world over the better part of a decade.
Somehow the music we created resonated (pun intended) and we found a great group of people with a local Label called Zabel, runned by the bands themselves. Putting up shows together, split releases and hanging out together was not only fun, but it also brought us a new group of people and we somehow created our own little scene. The music we created was labeled as Postrock, and although I disagree with that it did bring us closer to a lot of other likeminded bands and labels, and over the years our little network of people and bands became pretty large. After a while we were doing more then 50 shows a year, and we were asked to play all the time.
We toured a lot. Europe and England many times over, but also Russia, Canada, Japan, and quite a few cities and places I would never have had any reason to visit otherwise. We were not famous and we did not get rich, that was never the shape of it, but we were a working band, the kind that plays for a decade because the playing is the point and the rest is logistics. We slept on floors and in vans and occasionally in actual beds, we met people in every city who kept these scenes alive for almost no money, and we got very good at being a band because we did it constantly.
What I carry from those years is less about the shows than about how it all actually held together. None of it ran on a platform. It ran on relationships, on a booker in one city who knew a booker in the next, on a host who fed five tired people and asked for nothing, on the slow trust you build by turning up and doing what you said you would do. The infrastructure of an independent band touring the world turned out to be almost entirely human, and almost entirely invisible from the outside.
We vs Death is also the reason I think the way I do about all of this. I have seen, from the inside of a van, how much value moves through music and how little of it the musicians ever see, and how the parts that work best are the parts nobody monetised. A lot of what I am building now is an attempt to make that invisible network a little more visible, without taxing it to death in the process. The band gave me the question, and I am still working on the answer.
Love,
Marten
