Release data:

Purfoze – Songs of the Earth
CD-R, Rhea Music, 1984/2008

The Belgian cosmic music group Purfoze was founded in the late seventies by Ruud Rondou and Mark Creemers, Mark De Wit joined them in 1977. Between 1982 and 1989, the band, known for their warm analogue sound, would perform various projects for which they only used analogue synthesizers.

One of them was “Songs of the Earth”, a concept initiated by Ruud Rondou and Mark De Wit during 1983 as “slow music”, a kind of dark minimal background music for the theatre play “Gertrud” from Söderberg.

For the outcome, the duo envisioned it had to be dark and slowly changing deep space music with low dynamics, floating music that had a strong atmosphere with repetitive cosmic textures and slow repetitive patterns, demanding no special effort from the spectator/spectator. A kind of wallpaper ambient music.

Ruud and Mark had already played their “slow music” during a live concert in the Planetarium of Brussels in 1983, so the music for “Gertrud” was in fact one step further in this evolution.
As they were pleased with the outcome, they decided to compose more of this music. They call it “Songs of the Earth”, a title inspired by Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”, from which they used a heavily transformed excerpt.
In the course of 1984, the recordings for this project were finished and officially released on a C-60 music cassette. Until now, it has remained the only release from Purfoze.

“Songs of the Earth” contains five tracks of deep space music without compromises, offering soft waves of synthesized textures and soundscapes, meandering forth in a minimalist, hypnotizing style. This is spacious and hypnotizing ambient music in an Eno-esque style, best to be listened to and absorbed in the night time or with your eyes closed, played a low volume.

Although radio programs dedicated to electronic music (such as “Muziek uit de Kosmos” or “Kaleidofoon”) no longer existed, Purfoze received enthusiastic reactions back 1984 on their release, especially from Frits Couwenberg, who published the Dutch EM-fanzine KLEM.

After “Songs of the Earth”, Mark and Ruud composed new music in the course of 1985 that sounded even darker. They called it “Sterrenstukken/Songs of the Stars”, and can be regarded a perfect sequel of “Songs of the Earth”. It would become their last studio project, although the duo would perform a few more live concerts.

Website: rhea3.bandcamp.com