The Antwerp-area label that carried Belgian EBM out of the new-beat years and into the 1990s, and kept a door open for the stranger end of industrial music while it did.
KK Records began in 1987, and its catalogue opens with an outsider: KK 001 is The Initial Command, the December 1987 LP by Bill Leeb's Front Line Assembly, the Vancouver electro-industrial project. The label worked from Zwijndrecht, on the left bank of the Scheldt across from Antwerp, and its sleeves credit Coble as publisher from very early on. The founders are not named in any source I have found; the one figure on the staff side who is documented is Dirk Ivens of The Klinik and Dive, who worked for the label.
The late-1980s catalogue sits where the Belgian scene sat: on the line between new beat and EBM. Vomito Negro released Dare (KK 009) and Shock (KK 023) here before leaving for Antler-Subway after Human in 1990; Cat Rapes Dog made their albums for the label from 1989 to 1993; Insekt, The Force Dimension and the 1990 compilation Crack Of A Belgian Whip fill out the picture. Play It Again Sam handled distribution at home.
What I value most is the room the label made for the other end of the field. The Hafler Trio's Intoutof (KK 008, 1988) came in a die-cut, embossed sleeve with a locked groove; the Dreamachine book-and-record with Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth followed as KK 015; the Electrip sub-label opened with DDAA and the Aachen collective H.N.A.S.; and Controlled Bleeding's Music From The Scourging Ground appeared on KK CD in 1989. Few EBM labels of the period went that far out.
The 1990s spread the operation across sub-labels: Nova Zembla for trance and techno, Radical Ambient, Instinct Ambient Europe, and smaller house, pop and dance lines. The main series moved through Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia's techno years, Numb, Lassigue Bendthaus and Sielwolf to the late albums by Test Dept (Totality, 1995, and Tactics For Evolution) and Scorn (Zander and Whine, 1997), with Invisible carrying both in America. The friction showed by then: Mick Harris ended Scorn in May 1997 to finish his relations with the label, after it declined to fund a planned collaboration EP. The Neon Judgement's Dazsoo (1998) and Bauhaus's Gotham (KK 200, 1999) are among the last entries, and KK went bankrupt in 2000.
I keep KK at Tier II: the Belgian label that, alongside Antler-Subway, carried Belgian EBM through its first decade, and that left a catalogue wider and odder than its reputation as a dance-floor imprint suggests.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene