Club Moral emerged on January 1st, 1981, in Antwerp, Belgium, as both a collective and a challenge. Founded by artists Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AMVK) and Danny Devos (DDV), it operated as an industrial band, a performance platform, and a venue that became a magnet for Europe's most uncompromising voices. Between 1981 and 1987, the Antwerp space hosted exhibitions, happenings and live shows featuring Produktion, Boyd Rice, John Duncan, Coupe de Grace and others—turning the city into a crucial outpost of radical sound and image. The venue's inaugural event took place on June 19th, 1981, with État Brut performing alongside DDV and Mécanique Végétale. By September of that year, Club Moral debuted as a live act, quickly earning notoriety for their confrontational performances and uncompromising stance. Throughout the early-to-mid 1980s, they issued a string of now-legendary cassettes brimming with primitive electronics, power noise, conceptual gestures and raw industrial fury—documents that traveled far beyond Belgium's borders and cemented their place in the international underground.
By 1989, the duo had recorded their first vinyl LP for Cthulhu Records. That same year, they were invited by Frank Gorissen—then producing electronic music and hosting the radio program Radio Militia—to perform a live session in his studio. The result was a volatile mix of reworked material and spontaneous improvisation, captured on tape but never released. For decades, the recordings remained shelved, nearly forgotten. In 2024, Gorissen unearthed the original reels and produced a new master that faithfully preserves the session's intensity and immediacy. AMVK and DDV agreed to its release, and Van Kerckhoven created new cover art featuring portraits of individuals born or died on March 29th—the date of the recording—a conceptual marker linking the ephemeral performance to cycles of existence and extinction.
The release arrives nearly two decades after dead mind records issued the Lonely Weekends 7" in 2006, and it carries a different charge. This is not archival nostalgia but living documentation—a snapshot of two visionaries at work in real time, their methods direct, their vision unfiltered. The label's founder recalls attending a performance workshop led by DDV in the late 1990s, where extreme videos were screened and participants were pushed to confront their own limits. The experience left a lasting impression—one that echoes through this release, a reminder that Club Moral's work was never about comfort or compromise.
Listening now, decades removed from the original broadcast, the session feels less like a relic and more like a transmission still crackling with purpose. It's a document of the Belgian underground at its most vital, unvarnished and unapologetic.
