- Belgium has a bit of an image problem. In that people don't seem to have any image of it at all. While browsing a bookstore in Brussels before a recent gig at Fuse, I came upon a book called How Can One Not Be Interested in Belgian History, its title obviously positioned in opposition to the apparent prevailing wisdom that you'd have to be silly to have thought about it before. Techno-wise, there seems to be a similar aesthetic at work, but perhaps for different reasons. Before the party, which was to feature Peter Van Hoesen, Donato Dozzy, Anja Schneider, And.ID and the regular Fuse residents in the club's two rooms, yes, I wasn't sure how interested I was in Belgian clubbing. But that's because visions of fast techno all night, a crowd clamoring for harder sounds and a confused-looking Dozzy unable to find the digital files on his laptop to satisfy the horde were all dancing through my head.
Prognostication-wise, two out of three ain't bad. Due to a smaller crowd than expected, the night was compressed into one room, Fuse's expansive main floor. This didn't do anyone any favors, certainly. Everyone was forced into professional mode: shortened set times, crowd-pleasing speeds. Fuse's usually reliable duo of Deg and Pierre were reaching 130 BPM when we walked into the club at 12 AM, a frustrating sample of what was to come for the next six-and-a-half hours. Banging it out in advance of the impending live set of warm tech house from And.ID seemed counter-productive at best, rude at worst. But Deg and Pierre nonetheless got the crowd responding before And took over, and provided a much groove-oriented set of tracks in his hour behind his laptop.
Anja Schneider was next, and she ramped things up, playing at nearly the same tempo as Deg and Pierre, responding to the obviously techno desires of the audience. 75% full for most of the night, the club was right to only open one floor, but it meant that both the Mobilee crew played sets that were perhaps less varied than they might have been able to achieve in an ideal situation. The same was true of Peter Van Hoesen and Donato Dozzy who, due to the time crunch, were forced to play back-to-back. Van Hoesen, ostensibly celebrating the release of his debut full-length on Time To Express, didn't get the chance to pull the same sort of casually building set that he often does, instead relying on the quick and textured techno that he had placed on Dozzy's computer earlier on in the evening when he learned that they'd be playing back-to-back.
As a result, there weren't the same sort of blissful peaks and valleys that you'd expect considering their online mixes, collaborative releases or recorded live sets. This was the duo finding their favorite tracks at punishing levels. Khixbrrr's "Fairies," a track from Jeff Mills' "The Drummer," Ben Klock's remix of Martyn's "Is This Insanity?" all featured at a breakneck pace. And it was a testament to their DJing skill that it never sounded less than engaging, despite the obvious pandering to the crowd's BPM needs. But while my stereotypes of Belgium clubbing were confirmed on this night, Fuse's intentions are spot-on: The decision to make Van Hoesen a resident reflect an interest in bringing subtle changes to the club's music policy. Perhaps given the chance to spread the party over two rooms, things would have been very different musically. Given the chance to educate audiences to the range of his sound on a regular basis, nights featuring Van Hoesen in Brussels at Fuse should only get better going forward.