Marianna Maruyama & Hessel Veldman presents New Album: SALT (Stroom) + Lucy Valentine (UK) + GORGONZOLA LEGS
Lucy Valentine (uk)
Experimental musician and guitarist based in the United Kingdom. Lucy's experimental and collaborative work focuses mainly on long form drones and cassette recordings. Latest album 'Vault of Heaven' works exclusively with the historic Mellotron's sound banks. Bridging its unearthly celestial tones into the Heavenly, Vault of Heaven is a multimedia project focusing on analogue collage and creating surreal soundscapes to the accompany the artwork.
https://thecrystalcabinet.bandcamp.com/album/vault-of-heaven
SALT
The debut album by Marianna Maruyama and Hessel Veldman will be released January 2025 by the Belgium label Stroom.
“It took us a lot to get here. I’m not only talking about the time it took to make Salt, but the lifetimes we lived to arrive here. After all, when you combine the two of us, you’ve got a centenarian, and then some. Hessel and I like to comb the archives. We pick up sounds and words like small stones, and carry them home in our pockets. After looking at those stones on a shelf in my studio for years, I decided to return them to the beaches and canyons I’d inadvertently stolen them from, and I realised that a longer journey was in order. It involved a sailing trip where I found out I didn’t know anything about life on the water, much less how to pronounce ‘bow’, but where I received a gift of clarity on a cold, early spring day. A return to my childhood home, one that is real and imagined, likewise brought me there. And it conjured up distant memories of Tokyo, a lover’s silence, and extremely sensitive nerves in the mouth. Whatever brings you back, and however you manage to get there, a sense of levity arrives after leaving those stones in their rightful place. Salt is that way home, a ritual cleansing of the years.”
Marianna Maruyama,
IT’S NOT POETRY’S JOB TO GIVE WORDS TO FEELINGS
ANYWAY FEELINGS RESIST THE VERBAL
ALL SLIPPERY BY TONGUE AND CHEEK
TURNING THESE MOUNTAIN FEELINGS INTO MOUTH-SHAPED WORDS

Gorgonzola Legs on Tour
It was freezing cold, there was a power failure and a sudden ending, but everyone could return home safely. These were the circumstances of Gorgonzola Legs’ resurrection after some thirty years, with a ‘sound bombardment’ during a Ukraine-themed photo exhibition at the IJmuiden Visserhallen. A try-out like a battle, on Sunday 18 December 2022, leaving the audience behind in a state of confusion, as usual. They were witness to the unique character of Gorgonzola Legs: it was overwhelming.

The IJmuiden-based experimental music collective Gorgonzola Legs started its life in the heyday of the self-taping culture and industrial noise, back in 1984. Core members Hessel Veldman, Jos van Duijne, Herman te Loo and Gert-Jan Prins recorded a number of cassettes that were released on the Exart label.

Live, the quartet, sometimes expanded with guest artists, was to be found in the squatters’ circuit of the time. But they were also featured at renowned venues like Het Patronaat (Haarlem) and the Stedelijk Museum and the Bimhuis in Amsterdam. In 1988 the CD Piscatorial Debris, featuring Japanese guest vocalist Masaki Oishi, was released. The album was well received in the international press. From the early 1990s there was a long radio silence for the band. A meeting in the summer of 2022 gave rise to an inspired restart, a new phase in the history of Gorgonzola Legs: industrial-noise-punk-psychedelics; grimy soundscapes with alienating lyricism; free improvisation; the heritage of the threatening machine and performance art of the 1980s reinvented in the present day.

This year, the collective is planning a series of exclusive concerts. Exclusive, because no two shows will be the same. And also because all Gorgonzola Legs members are involved in their own (solo) projects as well. The venue, location or organization will also add its own unique elements to the brew. That’s why we are approaching you. We’d love to hear from you, should you be interested in a Gorgonzola Legs performance.

Hessel Veldman (guitar, electronics), Jos van Duijne (guitar, effects), Herman te Loo (saxophones, bass clarinet, vocals), Gert-Jan Prins (percussion, electronics)

https://www.youtube.com/live/SGkc35fzYwY?feature=shared