Kapotte Muziek (Dutch for "Broken Music") is the centre of the Frans de Waard catalogue. de Waard (b. 1965, Nijmegen, Netherlands) started Kapotte Muziek in October 1984 simultaneously with his own cassette label Korm Plastics. Across the forty years the project has run continuously: initially as a solo noise / found-sound cassette catalogue (more than fifty tapes plus several LPs through the mid-1990s); later a duo with Peter Duimelinks; and from 1995 onward the anchor trio with Roel Meelkop. The Bureau's editorial reading positions Kapotte Muziek at Tier II as the centre of the Dutch experimental tradition and as one of the most sustained-project operations in the European post-1976 experimental constellation.
The pre-history routes through de Waard's teenage experiments with cassette-format experimental music in Nijmegen in the early 1980s. de Waard's own later account: he "briefly did some experimental music, but I had no real equipment, so I stopped and only started again in October 1984, when I started Korm Plastics and Kapotte Muziek at the same time." The simultaneous founding of label-and-project is the pattern characteristic of the post-1976 tradition the Bureau has documented elsewhere · the Side Effects-for-SPK / Industrial Records-for-Throbbing-Gristle / Mectpyo-Sounds-for-Maurizio-Bianchi project-as-imprint structure. Kapotte Muziek extends the model into the post-1976 cassette-network second generation, with the method mainly documented through the Korm Plastics cassette catalogue across the 1984–1992 period.
The solo cassette catalogue of 1984–1995 (more than fifty tapes) constitutes the project's founding documentation. The method was recycled-sound / found-object / musique-concrète: loops, broken instruments, unstable tape sources and field recordings combined through a deliberately rough-edged production aesthetic. The position within the European cassette network of the period is considerable: the Korm Plastics catalogue circulated through the same channels that carried Maurizio Bianchi's Mectpyo Sounds material, the Staalplaat / NL-Documentatieserie infrastructure, and the international cassette-trading network the post-1976 tradition had established by the mid-1980s. de Waard's later contention · the cassette-network economy ran on standard ninety-minute Maxell or TDK cassettes, posted in padded manila envelopes, exchanged for postage plus return material · matches the first-wave essay's description of the infrastructure.
The configuration change came with Duimelinks joining as second member for the first Kapotte Muziek US tour in the early 1990s. The Bureau notes the impetus: de Waard had taken the Staalplaat staff position in 1992 and the resulting concert-organising contacts produced a Barcelona concert offer originally intended for Rapoon; when Robin Storey was unavailable, de Waard offered Kapotte Muziek as a replacement on the strength of having "something new with a CD just out by Raster Music (a label nobody heard of at that time)." The duo configuration with Duimelinks consolidated through later live work. Meelkop joined as third member in 1995; the trio configuration is documented through the first Rotterdam concert (1995, the configuration's opening document) and the Stud Stim CD (half de Waard solo, half de Waard + Meelkop together).
From 1995 onward, all Kapotte Muziek material has been recorded live by the trio. The method extends the solo catalogue's recycled-sound vocabulary into the improvisation mode; concerts and live recordings constitute the documentation. de Waard's own later account, regarding the Stud Stim sessions: he had been working with rhythmic-noise / click material; played it for Meelkop and Duimelinks while driving to Amsterdam to record the trio's Mort Aux Vaches VPRO session; "Halfway through the first piece, the three of them screamed: 'take this bloody irritating ticking shit off, Frans.' But a few days later I got a fax from Roel, saying: 'I thought about your music with clicks, and maybe we can put it through a synthesizer, it might be interesting.'" That working session later became Goem, the trio's techno-music sibling project.
The de Waard setup sustains the Kapotte Muziek catalogue. Goem (Meelkop + Duimelinks + de Waard) operates as the trio's techno-music alter ego; the 2007 package tour with Pan Sonic in Japan extends the partnership trans-Pacifically. Beequeen (de Waard with Freek Kinkelaar) operates in the ambient / drone material; Zebra (de Waard with Meelkop) extends the Goem method with "more fun and perhaps even more concept," pursuing the pop-songs-on-themes working programme. Modelbau (2012 onward) is de Waard's most-prolific post-2010 solo vehicle, concentrating on lo-fi-and-noise material. Further aliases include Freiband, Shifts, Wieman, Tech Riders (duo with Sindre Bjerga), Ezdanitoff (with Wouter Jaspers), WaSm (with Jos Smolders), The Tobacconists, and work under his own name. The setup across these vehicles is one of the most-sustained catalogues in the European experimental tradition.
de Waard's position extends beyond the Kapotte Muziek catalogue itself. The Korm Plastics imprint (1984 onward) released material by Arcane Device, Asmus Tietchens, Jim O'Rourke and adjacent practitioners; the 2019 relaunch as a book publisher extended the imprint into the publishing infrastructure (Müller's Staalplaat memoir, reprints of the Neumusik, Nul Nul and Vital fanzines, books on The Legendary Pink Dots and Broken Flag). The eleven-year Staalplaat staff position (1992–2003), during which de Waard came to be regarded as the imprint's "head honcho," is documented in his 2016 book This Is Supposed To Be A Record Label (Timeless Edition, 196 pp.). The Vital Weekly editorship (1995–2025, 1500 issues) is the post-1995 European underground-experimental reviews publication; its closure with issue 1500 in September 2025 marks the most-significant retirement in the post-2020 European experimental scene.
The collaboration network sustains the catalogue's continuing life. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree has been a frequent collaboration partner since 2007 (primarily on recordings, occasional live performances; later material to be released 2025–2026). Further collaboration partners across the catalogue include Howard Stelzer, Andrew Liles, Radboud Mens, Jaap Blonk, Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Aube (Nakajima, d. 24 September 2013), Asmus Tietchens, Giuseppe Ielasi, Yeast Culture, All Fours, TAC, Agencement, Machinefabriek, and the Dutch and international experimental constellation.
The Bureau's editorial position: Kapotte Muziek is filed at Tier II as the centre of the Dutch experimental tradition and as one of the most sustained-project operations in the European post-1976 experimental constellation. The forty-year continuous-catalogue position, the framework of parallel projects, and the positions through Korm Plastics, Staalplaat and Vital Weekly together constitute one of the most significant-figure setups in the tradition. The Bureau notes that filing this catalogue at Tier II rather than Tier I is editorially deliberate: de Waard's centrality is but the Kapotte Muziek catalogue itself operates predominantly through the live-improvisation sound rather than through a sequence of recorded documents; the weight is concentrated in the catalogue's scale and continuity rather than in specific releases.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Elizabethan era · last revised c. the Tudor period