Belgian independent label, founded 1987 in Sint-Niklaas by Eriek Van Havere as a one-man cassette imprint emerging from the European cassette-culture underground; sustained continuously across about 38 years through the contemporary period; filed at Tier II as the Continental experimental network's Belgian node and one of the period's clearer sustained single-editor cassette-into-CD imprints.
EE Tapes is the Belgian independent label run by Eriek Van Havere from his home in Sint-Niklaas, north of Antwerp. The operation has run continuously since 1987 as a one-man imprint: a single editor handling correspondence, editorial direction, packaging, distribution and the small-edition cassette-and-CD-and-CD-R-and-LP catalogue from a domestic address. The model is consistent with the European 1980s cassette-culture underground from which the catalogue emerged, and the Bureau notes that EE Tapes is one of the very few imprints from that period that has sustained the method across nearly four decades without expansion, label-roster turnover or commercial turn.
The opening of the catalogue is unusually well-documented. Van Havere (born 1957) was in the early 1980s co-editing the Belgian fanzine Bla Bla and helping out at The Kitchen record shop in Ghent. One day at The Kitchen he bought a small handful of cassettes by Human Flesh and Pseudo Code · the projects of Alain Neffe, the Belgian editor of the Insane Music collective and one of the period's clearest cassette-culture operators · and the cassette sleeves carried a contact address. Van Havere wrote to Neffe; Neffe wrote back; the correspondence opened a network that expanded through Frans de Waard (later of Staalplaat and Kapotte Muziek), Sandy Nys, Dirk Serries (the Vidna Obmana project), Andrew Hulme (Final Image / O Yuki Conjugate), Martin Bowes (Attrition), Gary Levermore (Third Mind Records) and Wolfgang Dorninger (die Ind). The catalogue's later roster is largely traceable back to that initial network and its expansion.
The editorial method has remained consistent across the operation's lifetime. Van Havere himself has described the position deliberately plainly: "No particular philosophy except maybe promoting the artists whose sounds I liked." Releases come about almost entirely by personal invitation, working through direct correspondence with the artist; the compilations operate the same way (Van Havere sends a written prompt to each contributor and assembles the resulting submissions). The catalogue carries no consistent house genre, no manifesto, no editorial gatekeeping beyond the editor's own taste; the result is a release-list that crosses cassette-culture experimental, dark ambient, minimal synth, musique concrète, electroacoustic, field recording and adjacent positions across the European underground (with occasional rock material as a counter-current; the Viktimized Karcass, Na Und and Dull Schicksal releases sit as the catalogue's minority anti-typology entries).
Two compilation series sit at the centre of the catalogue's editorial output. The Notre-Dame series, run across 13 volumes from about 1996 onward, operated under a single written prompt Van Havere sent to invited contributors: "Send me a dark imaginary soundtrack of your inner mind." The resulting series carries the catalogue's clearest sustained editorial position · dark, ambient-leaning, deliberately interior, deliberately uncommercial · and is the closest the catalogue comes to a manifesto. The Elegy series (1997 onward) operated as a second compilation programme in adjacent vein. Both series ran mainly on cassette in editions of about 100 copies, occasionally extending to CD or minidisc-format variants.
The catalogue's relationship to the Brume catalogue is editorially specific and the Bureau notes it as one of the imprint's defining sustained partnerships. The Renou / EE Tapes opening is the 2003 CD 7 Kisses (credited as C. Renou rather than Brume, the founding-name period). The partnership runs forward through After The Battle (A Chronicle Of The Joy Of Life) (2009, CD), the LP The Rusty Seeds (2019, vinyl in 100 copies, design by Jonathan Canady) and the contemporary CD La Violence du Néant (2023, 200 copies, a 69-minute single-track piece with artwork by Jonathan Canady and design by Jan Van den Broeke). The four entries cover a twenty-year period and document the catalogue's sustained commitment to Brume's method across formats; the partnership is complementary to the Rotorelief / Brume programme (contemporary new productions on vinyl) and the Waystyx Brume Anthology 1979–2000 archival position (the historical body of work).
The roster across the catalogue's 38 years runs to several hundred contributors. The Belgian-and-Dutch core includes De Fabriek, Maeror Tri, Dieter Müh, Deleted, Messy, BeNe GeSSeRiT, Human Flesh, Pseudo Code, Cor Gout (the Dutch writer and singer, of the band Trespassers W) and various Insane-orbit contributors. Beyond the regional core, the catalogue has extended to German projects (Nostalgie Eternelle · Stefan Heinze of Inox Kapell and Dieter Mauson of Delta-Sleep-Inducing Peptide), American projects (Big City Orchestra, Post Prandials, Viktimized Karcass) and Canadian projects (The Infant Cycle). The international scope is correspondingly modest: the catalogue's reach is the personal-network reach Van Havere has sustained through the post.
The contemporary operation has adapted minimally to the digital period. The eetapes.bandcamp.com page now carries the contemporary releases for international audiences, the eetapes.be website documents the available catalogue, and Jan Van den Broeke handles the Facebook page on Van Havere's behalf. Van Havere himself, in his late sixties through the contemporary period, has expressed only qualified enthusiasm for the digital tools ("a curse and a pleasure at the same time") while continuing the basic method: small-edition releases, personal-invitation editorial direction, correspondence-economy distribution. The Bureau treats EE Tapes as one of the period's clearest demonstrations that the 1980s European cassette-culture working model can be sustained across nearly four decades without compromise, dilution or drift, provided the editor is willing to operate at the model's natural small scale.