3 out of 5

The context I added for myself: Brainticket was a 60s / 70s Belgian krautrock / psych act, and flautist / multinstrumentalist Joel Vandroogenbroeck was their only longstanding member. From the 70s and, if less frequently, up until his passing in the mid-2010s, ___ dropped albums of experimental tunes which, alongside originals, also covered library music explorations, and what essentially amounted to digital doodles.

This is 1987 album Digitial Project (then credited to “V.D.B. Joel”), re-presented by Weme under a different title. Why Vandroogenbroeck? Why this album? Why the name change?

As guesses, for the former – the label is Belgian, so perhaps JVDB is more of a known quantity for label owner Fred. He could be a fan, or at the very least an appreciator. Why Digital Project? Maybe there’s a rights issue; while it seems like a fair amount of Brainticket and early JVDB has been reissued, once it Joel’s 80s stuff, the rereleases ended. While this album had at least one prior compilation, maybe its legalities were easier to nab than others. Or – as elucidated upon lightly below – maybe this specific release has ties to the electronic community…

Lastly: the name change. The photos used on the back cover are attributed to Joel himself (and presumably are newer than 1987), so perhaps Fred of Weme made contact as part of this process (or they were friends) and the renaming was an ask by the creator. Or another legal thing. I’m helpful!

As a bonus note, the new cover is maybe a, like, Frutiger Aero version of the original, which I hadn’t seen until staring at it for too long.

Great! Now you can point me to some article I missed that lays this all out in three easy sentences, or roll your eyes and tell me how Brainticket are actually, like, Beatles levels of awareness. On to the review, then.

Silicon Sirene is: Interesting! Also: Alright! First impressions for someone who never listened to any of this (or related) material before were, admittedly, slimmer than that, as the tunes here are not really sequenced in a necessarily engaging format, jumping between beats and atmospherics and moods without much consequence, and the pieces are fairly short, arguably without much development. With a second pass, though, and accepting JVDB as the same kind of driven auteur as, say, Moondog, it removes some burden from the music to be more than what it is, at which point it opens up. The short-cut nature of the collection is potentially to its benefit, as each song brings a new possibility, JVDB presumably learning about new technologies as we’re hearing his growth. And I don’t want to pitch these as all, like, single note tunes: again, ditching the preconceptions, I was suddenly hearing connections to Maurice Jarre’s 80s soundtrack work, and definitely looking just a few years forward to the boppy club of DMX Krew, or the playful electronica of Ceephax. The latter has a home on Weme as well, alongside acts like Repeated Viewing – whose synthwave soundtracks’ inspirations wouldn’t have been too removed from Silicon Sirene’s 1987 original release, accounting for why we hear some material akin to that as well.

These are loose links, but it strengthens why / how JVDB- any maybe this release in particular – made an impact on the scene that eventually led to Weme. Even with this more open mind, though, the B-side feels more clearly defined as samples or tests, with tracks named, simplistically, “Rock Program” and the like, making this side a bit more difficult with which to fully engage.

Definitely a relevant artifact worth exploring, including as a gateway to JVDB’s / Brainticket’s other material.