Forcing chance with four notes

Lees de Nederlandse versie

For the AB’s Rewind series Wim Mertens is reprising At home – Not at Home, Vergessen, and Struggle for Pleasure, three of his albums from the early 1980s. The eleven compositions were to form the foundations of a colossal body of work in which chance and intuition have always played a central role.

“I think there must be about 500 versions of ‘Struggle for Pleasure’ around by now,” says Wim Mertens. The general public knows the track above all as the leitmotiv of a Proximus ad. It is usually included in the encores at his concerts too, but even there it only made its appearance in the mid 1990s, over a decade after the vinyl mini-LP of the same name was recorded. “Before that the number had led a pretty anonymous life. My first collaboration with the director Peter Greenaway (for The Belly of an Architect, tp) employed it in an interesting film context and that had reciprocal effects.” Like a handful of other compositions from those early years, it surreptitiously began a new life via a variety of channels – advertising, film, TV, and live performance.
Mertens has noticed that in different countries it is often different compositions that appeal to people. “In France it is ‘Often a Bird’, in the Netherlands ‘4 mains’, in Spain and Italy ‘Maximizing the Audience’. What was crucial, however, was that there was a certain breadth to that first set of eleven numbers as well as an acuity in formulating things in four notes. For me those notes stand very clearly for the beginning of the Eighties. Take ‘Close Cover’: ‘tum tum ta-ta-tee ta tum’. That it was precisely those notes that came out then and later developed into something universal is still a strange phenomenon. But on the other hand an initial formulation often appeals more to the imagination. Look at Stockhausen. The period from 1950 to 1953 was crucial for him. He captured something then in a few notes that would turn out to be relevant
later. Something like that happens unintentionally.”

Used tapes
In the run-up to the concerts at the AB the eleven tracks in question have been re-released, together with a bonus-CD, Double entendre, which contains previously unreleased material from the same period. “Those

tracks still sound fresh, presumably because nobody was interested in them at the time. They crystallised
in my head without any compositional or strategic plan.”
Back then Mertens was still working as a producer with Radio 3, now known as Klara, in the Flagey building. The sessions took place in the evening and at night in small studios around Brussels, with Marc François at the recording desk. “The budgets were so low that we recorded on used tapes. So at the end of ‘Inergys (Reprise)’ you hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘Il y a des jours où on a tellement envie de douceur.’ That must be just about the only explicit text that crops up in thirty years of work [laughs] – an advertising text that was already on the tape. It was pure chance; actually I still always compose on the basis of the fundamental
conviction that the only thing we are sure of is chance.”
Even without vocals, for Mertens the starting point in composing has always been the voice. “The melody of ‘Struggle for Pleasure’ sounded like a sung line, but one taken up by different instruments. That gave it a certain accessibility that, in a time when everything
had to be in the score, wasn’t immediately appreciated.” But one that inexorably found its way into the collective memory.

(Photo © Alex Vanhee)


Rewind: Wim Mertens
15 & 16/3 • 20.00, SOLD OUT!
Ancienne Belgique boulevard Anspachlaan 110, 
Brussel/Bruxelles,
02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be