condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Edition of 180 copies. One-sided LP in fold-out sleeve with 4 inserts included.

Beequeen is the long-running duo of Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar, formed in Nijmegen in late 1988 after Legendary Pink Dots' Edward Ka-Spel invited Kinkelaar to open a concert in Utrecht and Kinkelaar brought De Waard along. Their band name is lifted from Joseph Beuys's 1956 sculpture Bienenkönigin: Beuys's ideas about warmth, organic growth, and hive-logic run through the project as a guiding philosophy.

Across the first fourteen years of Beequeen's existence, up through 2002's Ownliness, the group's mode was what they themselves called ambient-drone music, long patient pieces built from organs, synthesizers, processed guitar, and tape. Fond belongs to that decade-plus stretch and to the Korm Plastics imprint, the label De Waard had been running (alongside his Kapotte Muziek project) since October 1984.

If you know the sound, you know the territory: slow accumulations that seem to move only by seconds at a time, a sense of interior rooms opening onto further interior rooms, just enough unsteadiness in the drone bed to keep the piece from settling into wallpaper. The Beequeen method was an ambient music that refused the ambient contract, staying audibly present rather than receding. A small-edition Korm Plastics LP from the group's quieter period, and a characteristic entry point to the catalogue that De Waard and Kinkelaar would eventually, with 2002's Ownliness, announce they were leaving behind for a more song-centered approach.