Sometimes, listening to music is a reflective and solitary activity that takes you into the simplest places within. At other times, the experience of listening to music is a wild party peopled by legends from the past and present whose unlikely mingling creates outrageous and beautiful music where you would least have expected to find it. Ten Adem is an outrageous cabaret, a breath of fresh air, a rocket ship to the future, a return to the past!
The Belgian-based poetry and music collective, which was founded in 2007, is organized around around performance poet Bardthesque. Today Ten Adem consists out of Joshua Dellaert on bass, poet Bardthesque and "keyswizard" Thomas Vanhauwaert. During the last fourteen years this trio has played hundreds of gigs throughout Belgium, The Netherlands, Slovenia and Namibia, while releasing two official albums and bootlegging several in situ projects, commissions, collaborations… Ten Adem has also produced two music theatre shows: Bastaardt in 2016 and the upcoming Schoone liedjes & Lelijke liedjes (beautiful songs & ugly songs). Currently, the band is waiting for an adequate vaccine, so they can record an intermediate EP, followed by their third full album.
Can you describe your influences/ predecessors?
I would say that we quench our thirst from the same pond as Abramovic, Anaximander, Artaud, Bacon, Bataille, Behan, Beefheart, Bergman, Bernini, Beuys, Broodthaers, Bukowski, Burroughs, Caravaggio, Cash, Cave, Chillida, Cohen, Czukay, Dante, Diogenes of Sinope, Doors, Duchamp, Duval, Dürer, Ensor, Ernst, Friedrich, Gentileschi, Géricault, Goethe, Goya, Grünewald, Hadewych, Hatzigeorgiou, Heliogabalus, Heraclitus, Hertmans, Horn, Iggy pop, Ilias, Jarrett, Kahlo, Kant, Kertesz, Kieslowski, King Tubby, Klein, Kollwitz, Krs-One, Kubin, Lévi-Strauss, Ligeti, LKJ, Louise Michel, Lurie, Magritte, Manzoni, Marinetti, Merckx, Messerschmidt, Michelangelo, Millet, Miro, Newmann, Nietzsche, Nirvana, Ockham, O’keeffe, Orpheus, Osdorp Posse, Partch, Pasolini, Pastorius, Paz, Pessoa, Pogues, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Quincy Jones, Rimbaud, Roadrunner, Run-D.M.C., Sappho, Satie, Schiele, Shaffy, Spinoza, Tarantino, Tarkovski, Tatlin, Thomas, Tintoretto, Uilenspiegel, Valéry, Velasquez, Villon, Waits, Wittgenstein, Wobble, Xenophon, Yeats, Zeno, Zorn.
What did you dream about when performing wasn't possible during the pandemic?
Of those things that you come across before, during or after a gig. Things which you didn’t even know you were searching for, but simply because you are there, in that very specific, perhaps unique situation, they appear, unavoidable, crystal clear. Let’s say that you are backstage searching for an audio-cable but you end up in the wrong room where you meet a stranger that introduces you to this obscure poetry. We all experience these coincidences, causalities, apparent magic, this serendipity. The stuff where stories come from made of can make the unbelievable solid, the unlikely tangible. It seems to be something between an intuition and a breeze, but it is as real as a rock and you need to keep moving in order to get the best out of it and, of course, since march 2020 the latter was particularly hard. Although serendipity happens all the time, everywhere and to everyone, during the pandemic it became quite clear that it strikes harder in the flesh, in the physical presence of others, where the unexpected can freely roam and playfully affect the situation, rather than online. ten adem can take a good beating, but after about fifteen months of punches it is time to start moving again, time for some old-school serendipity.
Any forthcoming projects?
It has been postponed a few times, but in August we will finally be able to present our newest live production called ‘Schoone liedjes & Lelijke liedjes’ (Beautiful songs & Ugly songs). As the title suggests, we have something for all of you: love songs, deep funk, pop stuff, jazz tunes, chanson, raw hiphop, a poem on the side. We will also bring some exquisite guests on stage. This show will be the onset for our forthcoming album, by the way. We like to distil an album from a live show, as we have done previously with our second album Katzenjammer and the Bastaardt production.
One of our missions at Music Traveler is connecting artists. Any dream collaboration you’d love to see happen?
A collab with Einstürzende Neubauten or Bohren & der Club of Gore should be very interesting. On the other hand we could actually use a Wiener Sängerknaben choral for a song or two. And if RZA would like to produce a track, we probably wouldn’t say no.
How has streaming changed your approach to music?
It hasn’t.