Surprieze

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

The 2002 Grey Past Records reissue (DUST 003) of one of the most legendary obscure Dutch private pressings: the only album by Surprieze, the Breda-based project of Eddie van der Meer, self-released in late 1972 in a tiny 500-copy edition. The original record was financed by van der Meer (who saved 100 guilders per month for twenty months from his social-assistance benefit), recorded on a simple Sony home recorder in an old school building in Breda, and pressed with a sleeve assembled from black-and-white prints over blank jackets.

The music is unclassifiable, anarchic, free-improvisational psych at its most homemade. The opening "Klasziek (Clas-sick)" is a quiet classical guitar and violin instrumental (van der Meer on Spanish acoustic, Jacques van Poppel on violin). Two blues numbers follow ("Just The Blues", "Eddie's Harpblues"). And then the record veers into "Lazarus", fourteen minutes of echo-drenched guitar drone, free-improvisational vocals and stuporific hypnotic mantra, closer to Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" reimagined by a Dutch home-recording loner than anything else in the 1972-73 European catalog. Adrie Heeren plays drums; an unnamed French clarinet/bombarde player adds reed work.

The pressing on offer is the 2002 Grey Past Records reissue on DUST 003, with the original "Twister" fairground photograph cover reproduced. After negative reviews in 1973 van der Meer threw the remaining copies of the original pressing into the North Sea at Scheveningen. Not the 1972/73 self-released original, but the proper way to actually hear it.