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For the Soul

Dirk Wachtelaer

Label: LaoBan Records
Released: 2025
Duration: 00:41:02
Views: 23

Tracks

Frayed Threads; What the Silence Carried; Ghosts Don't Hum In Tune; Burnmark; Memory Folds Inward; Blood Current; Afterlight; Embers in the Static; A Fabric Called Dirk; Sublow

Personnel

Album Description

Voor De ZIELE is no map. It’s a spinning compass, its needle torn loose, vibrating in impossible directions. You won’t find resolution here—only sonic detonations that pull you further into the vortex. Listen closely, but don’t try to make sense of it. Let it unmake you. Dirk and Dirk are explorers of sound and chaos, architects of instability. Their music thrives on the unstable, alive in the cracks between precision and disorder. Their bond is a strange glue: instinct, trust, and a willingness to push until something unravels. This music doesn’t settle. It responds. It leads and listens. Tracks begin and end in disarray, their boundaries smudged, their cores raw and untamed. It is improvisation stripped to its essence, built on singular ideas born, explored, and abandoned in minutes. Nothing lingers, nothing repeats. The signal arrived at dawn—a flicker in the void, an email too strange to be real. Was it a glitch? A wormhole? A phishing scam written in the language of chance? No. It was something stranger: a message from Dirk to Dirk, a cosmic overlap, two edges of the same name folding into themselves. A handshake through the ether, a meeting of drums and circuits, static and skin. Dirk Stromberg is a nomad, his sound shaped by restless migration through Europe, the U.S., and Southeast Asia. Constantly uprooted, constantly adapting, his music is the noise of transition, the voice of a shifting identity. Dirk Wachtelaer is a wanderer, rooted in Belgium but lost to Asia for a decade, where he dissolved into its pulse and rhythms, reassembling himself in fragments of sound and being. Two artists in orbit, their paths spiraling closer until chance locked them into collision. The first meeting was electric: a rehearsal in a studio, where sound erupted like a fuse lit in the dark. Influenced by metal bands, free improvisation, and the kaleidoscopic haze of psychedelia, they found themselves leaning into a visceral language of chaos and fire. Over years, the collaboration grew. Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore—each performance a new fragment of the puzzle. And then Brussels, four days of raw immersion. One day to tune into the alien air of the room, two days of recording, and a concert—an eruption released as a separate album. Hours of sound created and discarded, carved down into this: a collection of sharpest edges, moments distilled into their most coherent chaos. The Fryprone and the drums: conspirators, lovers, antagonists. Stromberg’s Fryprone—a hybrid machine of sensors and accelerometers—responds to every touch with unpredictable fury. Wachtelaer’s drums bend rhythm into time-warping, fractal shapes. Together, they fight, they sing, they howl at each other. They merge into a singular, shape-shifting voice.

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