Those drums! Slagerij Van Kampen’s A Long Walk On A Short Pier is a must have for those who appreciate purely percussive music. A brilliant mish mash of all sorts of “tribal” music, Slagerij Van Kampen’s A Long Walk On A Short Pier takes you out of their Dutch roots and transports you to the world of hypnotic African, Middle Eastern, and Asian music. Quite simply: it’s a fourth world via brutish force.
Slagerij Van Kampen began in Eindhoven, Netherlands as a duo composed of Willem van Kruysdijk and Mies Wilbrink. At that time, in the early ‘80s, they were a group of black-clad post-punk kids who had fallen in love with the sounds of the African Drums of Burundi and tried to see how they could take an even further guitar-less approach to the rebel music of that time.
Willem van Kruysdijk had been floored, at a young age, by the sheer noise and volume of marching bands. Gifted a drum set at that young age, a well, he’d become somewhat of an autodidact, picking up technique by drumming along to the African and world music he heard on the radio or on collected LPs. When he met Mies, a classically trained drummer, an instant connection was made. Together they tried to make music that was simple enough that anyone else could join in but well-thought out enough that it wasn’t merely an attempt to mimic the influences they drew inspiration from. Realizing that they were too “masculine” in thought, they invited and integrated two female drummers Dree Van Beeck and Renée Frankhuizen to widen out the scope of their group.
As Slagerij Van Kampen, a name they took from a Tintin comic, they initially began as a band of people who really wanted to enjoy drumming and performing together. In 1986, they would debut as a mere 4-piece acoustic percussion unit that’d improvise on stage, in many Dutch venues that were home to rock or punk concerts. Simply seeing the site of four percussionists dressed in black performing extremely loud groove music made their early less-developed EP far more successful than they aspired to be.
In 1987, when they were signed to a much larger label, Slagerij Van Kampen began to flesh out their 4-piece by augmenting their traditional instruments with electronic triggers hooked up to all sorts of sample-based instruments. Likewise, now more confident in their stage show, in the studio they began to create sprawling epics that dipped all their global influences through a more unified sound. The fascinating and (now) completely rare Out Of The Doldrums pitched them as a leftfield world beat group that stepped out of the aggro world, into something approximating more the world of Steve Reich or other mystical-sounding electro-acoustic composers.
On A Long Walk On A Short Pier, they would turn political, absorbing the fire of anti-apartheid sentiment to present a longing, personal ode to their African connections in South Africa. Songs like “Mosi Oa Tunya”, “The Mountain To Mohammed”, “Les Vieux Griots”, were explicit written as anti-colonialist epics, that took to task the Anglicized view of discovery by exploring the Zulu and griot tradition in a magnificent way. And so it went, with each section of the album exploring and expanding upon music influenced by each continent’s early, aboriginal inhabitants.
Their first album on a major label, it rolled in two prior songs from Out Of The Doldrums and produced this sprawling work which seems to imagine their groove as something far more global and united. Songs like “Tellem Mallets” or “Wakarimasen” remind me of Mkwaju’s or Apsara’s similar respectful, yet aspirational take on world music. The aim of all this wasn’t ever to sublimate our impulse to explore things outside our lived experience, but to understand how we can inspire others to see our connection with that which we don’t know, that wherever where we decide to take this music. The titular track covers this in one moving rhythmic meditation to this. All it takes is one bang, one drum, one rhythm, or as they put it: a long walk, on a short pier.
All cultures contribute to our world. Rather than drown in self-conceit we should cherish each other and what each has to give. We must learn to respect our fellow humans and together we can save nature, our environment, our earth.
From liner notes to A Long Walk On A Short Pier