Belgium is small, but it is also anything but small. While it would take you four hours – bathroom breaks included – to cross the country, you will inevitably pass through plenty of different languages, cultures, and even social constructs. Similarly, this geographically small nation has a rich history of music that extends far beyond the 1980s new beat craze. For the youth growing up in the 1990s and noughties in the primarily German-language Eastern region, rave culture was especially important, says Michael Kreitz: »The perceived complete lack of identity during the 1990s and noughties made electronic music and the associated codes, rituals, and social manners felt extremely rebellious and meaningful; like something that would give us an identity.«
Kreitz soon started to give back, first as a member of the Klangforschung Ost crew and as a curator of the electronic line-up of the Alive festivals, booking techno giants such as Robert Hood or IDM icons like µ-Ziq to perform a stage away from German nu metal bands. After the festival had been discontinued, he decided to focus on his studies and move to the capital Brussels in 2003. There he met and finally ended up sharing a flat with fellow German-Belgian Christophe Houyon. It didn’t take long for them to found Meakusma – the highly evocative and open-to-interpretation name was coined by DJ Sofa – as an event series that straddled the line between straightforward club music and the fringes of electronic music. In 2006, Ampoule label owner Pub suggested the two also start a label.
The first Meakusma release was a 28-track DVD that was published in collaboration with Ampoule alongside a three-part vinyl series with cuts by close friends and far-out artists such as Roger23, Terrence Dixon, or Move D & Benjamin Brunn. »Rüts« marked the starting point for a label that is positively unpredictable—early stand-out releases include outsider house tunes by Madteo, the otherworldly jam electronics of Georgia, and the melancholic left-field dance pop of Different Fountains. In 2016, the event series also grew into a three-day festival based in the sleepy city of Eupen near the German border. According to Kreitz, this was merely a logical next step after more than a decade of putting on club nights and concerts in the region and elsewhere.
Things will remain unpredictable
The Meakusma festival soon started to attract a diverse audience from all over Europe thanks to its jam-packed, diverse line-ups. This also meant that operations grew, and more people came into the fold. Today, Kreitz and Houyon—sharing the major responsibilities ranging from curation to administration and production—work with Rafael Severi, who together with Michael Leuffen a.k.a. ML edits the festival magazine, David Langela, in charge of funding applications, and Monita Wagma, who in the future will lead projects related to Studio Néau, a radio station established by the Meakusma crew in a park in Eupen in the late 2010s. Over time, the grassroots initiative organically grew into a DIY empire—no small feat, considering that its founders still hold day jobs and operate left-of-centre.
Clairvoyant Dimensions
Tornamented Walls
Halcyon Future
Stakes
The idea behind both the events and festival as well as the label has always stayed the same, Kreitz notes: »It is all about wanting to share the music that we have discovered.« But are there any common threads that tie together the minimalist post-rock of Tomaga, Viola Klein’s communal approach to organic house music, dubbed out industrial by Joachim Nordwall under his The Idealist moniker, or recent ventures into unconventional pop territory like on Radio Hito’s curious recent album »L’uso e gli attributi del cuore?« Not really, says Kreitz: »Stylistically speaking, Meakusma doesn’t have any pre-defined criteria or a coherent sound. We like music with a certain warmth, even when it is rather raw or experimental. This diversity is not a contradiction, but part of our identity.«
This radical openness has led Meakusma to put out records that you wouldn’t expect from a label with more than a few techno and house records under its belt and an apparent affinity to all things dub as well as analogue electronics. In collaboration with Soundway, the label reissued the 1973 self-titled album by the Accra-based, Fela Kuti-approved jazz-funk unit Hedzoleh in 2022. As it turns out, Kreitz grew up with bandleader Stanley Todd’s son Sacha in the small town Bütgenbach, to which the prolific musician had relocated after the political situation in his native Ghana had turned sour. Accompanied by a remix package featuring contributions by Mark Ernestus, Jimi Tenor, Equiknoxx’s Gavsbourg, and Waltraud Blischke, it paid tribute to a towering, but overlooked figure in East Belgium’s music history.
As unexpected as this project was, it is probably most representative for a label that was founded by people who once went out searching for an identity, found themselves on a dancefloor and discovered that they felt most comfortable at its fringes; who did not need to gravitate towards big cities in a country that is geographically small but culturally vast; who do not move in straight lines and find it more fulfilling to connect distant dots with one another. As an event series, festival, radio, publisher, and label, Meakusma is many things at once—and most importantly it is in dialogue with the world around it. As the festival returns after two years this September, the label might take it a bit more slowly in the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly though, it will have a few surprises in store for its audience.
