The first product arrived on the market in a small transparent plastic bag. Long before museum shops and department stores chains succumbed to this marketing idea, the Brussels music label Les disques du crépuscule, set up in 1980, demonstrated how an up-to-the-minute art and design article should look. Right from the outset, the cassette compilation »From Brussels With Love«, together with a 16-page booklet designed down to the last detail with a sure stylistic hand and slipped into the aforementioned PVC cover, was more than just a music sampler. An 80-minute »audio-magazine« comprising interviews, for example with Brian Eno or Jeanne Moreau, as well as specially made jingles or made-to-order pieces of music. Here we find the first sign of life from the group that had just put an end to its existence as Joy Division, only to arise from the ashes again as New Order, a rare piece by Factory Records’ very own producer, Martin Hannett, or a sound study on neglected nocturnal »shadow gardens« from the forgotten British sound experimenter Bill Nelson. The second musical pole – a counterpart to dark, post-punk études, at their aesthetic zenith back then – was formed by works from the ambient scene, also gaining ground during this period: Harold Budd, Gavin Bryars, or early soundtrack compositions by the prototypical classical post-Modernist Michael Nyman.
However »From Brussels With Love« does not contain just a prestigious blend of post-punk and ambient, with art discourse bundled in for good measure, but provided the blueprint for the label’s entire design, which made its influence felt well into the late 1990s. Whilst there was soon a switch from cassette to vinyl (and later CDs), this however also comprised integrating all kinds of additional products into the programme – just as Factory had already done with multiples such as Linder Sterling’s famous »Menstrual Egg-Timer«. From then on, concert posters and badges were part of Les disques du crépuscule’s product range alongside the audio and video magazines described above. The magazine idea was also reflected in the fact that individual editions were released in ever-changing configurations, and indeed in the way that the open-ended nature of particular projects, such as the Christmas compilation »Ghosts Of Christmas Past«, was manifested in perpetually new recombinations. Watching carefully over all of this was the cutting-edge design intention of graphic designer Benoît Hennebert, who – in a vein comparable only with Neville Brody or Peter Saville – reactivated a pronouncedly modernist vocabulary for selected Eighties products and in the process also contributed to the strange intermeshing of post-Modernism and endless reminiscences of modernity still in vogue today. In the process, Hennebert mobilised a rich spectrum of various different types of image, ranging from abstract painting, finely honed watercolours and witty comic drawings right through to scientific, portrait and amateur photography or surprisingly coherent collages of all of these.
The melancholy basic tenor of the visuals corresponded outstandingly well with the label’s overall programme. »Crépuscule« always held a hint of a remote connotation of the dawning of a new musical age, one which would also be intermeshed with visuality. However the decisive factor was the conceptual horizon of a »seediness « with positive connotations, something that was found not just in the works of classic post-punk bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Tuxedomoon or Josef K, but also rubbed off on local forms of the new musical idiom. Les disques du crépuscule helped launch the careers of musicians with a strong regional base like Marine, Soft Verdict or Isabelle Antena, although here too a shift in the basic sound so typical of the 1980s can also be detected. Whilst Antena produced an exhilarating wave-like pop sound dotted with a whole host of citations and even extending to inserted bursts of exoticism, the Brussels band Marine (later Allez Allez) subscribed completely to the dark obsessive depro-funk of groups such as The Au Pairs or A Certain Ratio. The legacy of these short-lived local matadors is to be found on the video compilation »Umbrellas In The Sun«, where a short half-hour collage film captures the brief, concise oeuvre of the band in unpretentious Super-8 miniatures and concert clips.
During this era Brussels actually began to become something like »One Big Euro-City«, in terms of pop music and art too. Not only had US bands like Tuxedomoon moved here, but the entire city exuded a neo-modern yet old-style continental magnetism, bringing together Nouvelle Vague and electronic music, a still vital auteur principle and non-Anglo-American sentiment. It was only when Electronic Body Music began its triumphal march, also taking Brussels as its starting point, that the productive ambiguity slowly drew to an end and the twilight zone of positive indifference and somnambulant style finesse was displaced by a harshly illuminated endless night.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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