De Fabriek.

De Fabriek (Dutch for The Factory) is the long-running Zwolle-based DIY industrial / sound-collage collective started in December 1977 by Richard van Dellen and Andries D. Eker. The project is explicitly not a band: it has historically operated as a work-union with a rotating cast of participants, runs its own cassette and digital label, and treats the limited handmade edition as the catalogue's constitutive form. The Soundohm artist note: Not considering themselves a regular band (for one thing, they are a label too) they present The Factory as a kind of work-union. The Platform 23 reissue summary: active since the late 70s to today, De Fabriek have never considered themselves a real band · being also a label too · with an evolving and irregular line up centred around Richard van Dellen. Richard van Dellen has remained at the controls across all forty-eight years.

The catalogue's early period runs through Krautrock-influenced experimental minimalism. The first cassette releases circulated from 1977–1980 (largely undocumented in the published discography); the first significant cassette-and-vinyl statements were Schuurpapier (1980) and Enduro 3333 (1981). The 1980 lineup carried Richard van Dellen, Heinz Bönig and Andries Eker. By 1982 the catalogue had assembled enough material to produce a wave of releases · the first LP Schafttijdsamba (1982, self-released; later reissued by BFE Records in 2018 in an edition of 300), the Blecheintopf: Music for Modern Art Exhibitions Volume Two cassette (1982, originally a self-published edition of ten, immediately reissued on Nico Selen's New Bulwark Records imprint with Selen joining the band under the pseudonym Wolff P. Rillings), and the further 1982 LPs Future Print, Members Only, Moda Bella, Fabrieks Conseqensus and Solenoid Goes Fabriek. The Futura Resistenza reissue note on Blecheintopf: Scrap Metal Hotpot · (post-)industrial, self-made, eclectic, mixed up. The track Harrisburg on Blecheintopf is named for the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor accident, then the largest pre-Chernobyl nuclear incident.

The 1983 LP Neveleiland is the catalogue's landmark second statement. Released in a few hundred copies on Esplendor Geométrico's own Spanish label Discos Esplendor Geométrico, the record carries two sides of story-telling in the Moluccan and Icelandic languages set against a droney electronic background. Influenced by The Residents around Eskimo and by Conrad Schnitzler. The Soundohm artist note describes the LP as a landmark in the history of Dutch experimental music. The contact with Esplendor Geométrico (the Madrid industrial duo of Arturo Lanz and Saverio Evangelista) shifted the catalogue's vein from Krautrock-minimalism toward a more industrial-noise vocabulary in the years that followed.

The cassette-network mid-1980s and 1990s. De Fabriek became, in the BFE Records reissue summary, a vital and productive part of the industrial music DIY cassette label culture of the 1980s and 1990s. The catalogue branched into a long-running Music For cassette series (Music For Scanners with Kapotte Muziek 1988; Music For Hippies 1988; Music For Endless Cassettes 1989; Music For Zelftapers B 1989) and into a sequence of collaborations with the European DIY-industrial circuit. Apokalypse (1992) is the joint LP with Telepherique (Würzburg, Bayern); Alaska Show (1998) is the joint with the Bavarian collective Doc Wör Mirran. The catalogue across this period continues at roughly two to three records per year through cassette, LP, CD-R and CD on Richard van Dellen's own label, on Nico Selen's New Bulwark Records, and across the DIY network.

The late 1990s and 2000s catalogue (Quatro-Erogenic-Occupy Theme's 1999, Objects of Desire Store 1999, Join Us! 2005) continues the same assemblage method, with the band's output sliding largely off the noise-circuit promotional grid. Robert Bloemkolk's reviewer-note on the catalogue: They have been at it for years, this Dutch collective · no, they are not a band · it's fuck the trends sound art or whatever you want to call it. And it's refreshing. The Platform 23 reissue note on Music For Hippies (Bandcamp, 2022): showing the band's expansive range, moving away from the noise, drone and industrial soundscape releases they had become known for and crafting here, free flowing, groovy longform jams.

The contemporary catalogue. Archaic (2020, 2xCD) is the recent major statement · two long-form pieces, each playing as a single track but with twenty-four to twenty-nine sub-titles per side, carrying participation from about fifteen contributors including the current core (Richard van Dellen, Louise Nanuru, Peter van Vliet, Martijn Hohmann, Peter Ehrmann), Klaas Mons, Frans de Waard (a long-time Kapotte Muziek partner; The Quietus-published Dutch experimental writer), Andries Eker, Simon Steiner and others. The Bandcamp summary: For more than thirty years, the amorphous Dutch group De Fabriek have been committed to a particular kind of assemblage practice. The reissue programme has reached Schafttijdsamba (BFE Records 2018, edition of 300), Music For Hippies (Platform 23 2022, with Dunkeltier and Khidja remixes), and Blecheintopf (Futura Resistenza 2022).

Citation. The Bureau files De Fabriek at Tier I as the long-running Dutch DIY industrial / sound-collage collective and as the catalogue's entry for the post-1977 European cassette-network tradition. The method · the work-union rather than band; the assemblage rather than composition; the limited handmade edition rather than the commercial pressing; the catalogue's explicit disinterest in commercial-noise promotional network · sits structurally adjacent to the Nurse With Wound and Smegma traditions the Bureau documents elsewhere as their non-band parallels. Cross-references across this archive: the Esplendor Geométrico association through the 1983 Neveleiland LP; the Telepherique joint LP Apokalypse 1992; the Kapotte Muziek joint Music For Scanners 1988 (Frans de Waard); the Doc Wör Mirran joint Alaska Show 1998. The catalogue's position in 1980s Dutch experimental music sits alongside the Amsterdam Fetisj scene (Das Ding, Plus Instruments) and the DIY network across Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague.