Korm Plastics is the label-shaped centre of Frans de Waard's vast activity, and the Bureau files it at Tier II for its curatorial position and its connector role. De Waard is one of the most prolific figures in European experimental music, working at once as a musician across a dozen projects, as a label-runner, as a distributor and as a long-serving critic, and Korm Plastics is the thread that ties those roles together. It meets the curatorial-position test as the home of a coherent body of work, and the connector-node test through de Waard's unusually central place in the small-label network.
The label has run since the early 1980s, and its closest function has always been to house its founder's own output. De Waard's projects, Kapotte Muziek, Beequeen, Shifts, Goem, Freiband and Modelbau among them, amount to one of the larger discographies in the field, and Korm Plastics has been the natural place for much of it. That makes the label inseparable from the man: to file Korm Plastics is partly to file the overall shape of de Waard's career.
It has never been only a vanity operation, though. The label and its sub-imprints have issued work by Roel Meelkop, Jos Smolders and a wide circle of electroacoustic, drone and noise artists, and two of its projects stand out as genuine contributions. The Brombron series, co-run with the Extrapool arts space in Nijmegen, paired two artists for a residency and a resulting record, producing a long run of collaborations that would not otherwise have happened. And the Korm Plastics book line, plainly produced and unglamorous by design, has documented corners of the scene that nobody else bothered with, including America's Greatest Noise, the story of Ron Lessard's RRRecords.
What makes the label a connector rather than a private outlet is the breadth of de Waard's other roles. As a distributor he moved other people's records; as the long-time writer of the Vital Weekly review newsletter he covered an enormous volume of small-label releases week after week, becoming one of the most reliable points of documentation for the international experimental underground. Korm Plastics lies at the junction of all that activity, and the label's reach is really the reach of de Waard's attention, which has been very wide and very sustained.
The operation has moved with the formats, from vinyl and cassette through CDR to the Korm Digitaal download line, across four decades, and it remains active alongside de Waard's continuing flow of releases. It is not a label with a single famous record so much as a label that has quietly held a scene's worth of activity together over a very long span.
The Bureau's reading. Korm Plastics is filed at Tier II as the curatorial and connector node built around Frans de Waard. Its canonical body of work is de Waard's own large discography; its connector role runs through the Brombron series, the book line, the distribution work and the Vital Weekly documentation. It is cross-referenced to de Waard's projects and to the sister tape-and-electroacoustic labels it shares a world with, and read here as one of the quiet institutions that kept the international experimental underground legible.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Victorian era · last revised c. the Holocene