Underground Rock and Pop Music at Muziekgieterij Maastricht
Crossroads writer Amrit Dhir sat down with Jan Sluijsmans, Director of Production & Programming for Muziekgieterij, a new resource for Maastricht’s underground rock and pop music community, on a Friday evening while local bands performed on the venue’s main stage.
They discussed the founding and development of the Muziekgieterij concept; the recent success of the inaugural Bruis festival on the Market square; why the Netherlands’ music scene has much to learn from Belgium; and the astonishingly low cost of renting a rehearsal space.
Amrit: Muziekgieterij has been around for just under a year. How did you get started?
Jan: Officially, we opened in January 2007, but we’ve worked on the idea for six years now, since the first brainstorm sessions about what we were going to do, what would be possible, and what would be necessary… The first idea was only to find a place to make some rehearsal rooms, but as we talked more and more and did some research into how many bands there are in Maastricht – about 80 bands! -. we realized that they also needed a stage where they could present themselves.
A: When is the stage used?
J: At the moment, it’s on Fridays and Saturdays, and we’re trying to arrange concerts once a week. But, when we get our license from the city hall, we can do any day of the week. We can do seven days a week of programs, concerts or parties.
A: How long will it take you to get the license?
J: We’re working hard on it. It will take a few months. “The Big Boss” [this is the phrase Jan uses when refering to Wim Smeets, Managing Director of Muziekgieterij] is working on all the political issues and dealing with the city hall. And I do productions and programming.
A: Was it Wim who originally approached you with the idea for Muziekgieterij?
J: Yes, I had a studio in Vaals and I was working in the music industry, doing live productions of events…. So, Wim – he’s a musician also - came to me six years ago and said I could have a rehearsal room in Maastricht. It was somewhere else, and it was very bad. There was no heating, and there were rats running around the place.
Then Wim said he was going to try to find something for Maastricht where bands can rehearse in a good environment… and so came the first ideas, over drinking a beer. What can we do? Can we do it like this? We had a few plans. And in the end, we came through politics. Wim was already talking to politicians before, and I was mainly concerned with what the place should look like, what should be in it.
A: Did you come up against much resistance from the city hall?
J: Yeah, because everyone was saying: “Oh, pop music, that’s nothing for Maastricht.” Actually then, we would go and talk to these people – I was present at a few meetings in the beginning – and we came to the conclusion that they don’t know what’s going on in this city, because there are 25,000 students, and everyone is complaining that there’s nothing going on in Maastricht. And the city people don’t listen.
The problem of Maastricht is that if the city doesn’t do anything about it, it’s going to be a city for old people. And the problem for companies like Vodafone [one of Muziekgieterij’s primary sponsors] is that they are not able to get skilled personnel because people study here and then they leave. They go to Amsterdam or Tilburg or Paris or back home. If Maastricht wants to get its economy going for the future, it has to make sure that all these people – or a big part of these people – start businesses here so that the city gets creative.
We had the luck that we had some good people on our board. And the director at Vodafone is a guy who can put in some weight. They told the city hall: “We’re doing something; you should do something too.”
A: How large is the board?
J: We have four people right now. And on top of that, we have a Board of Supervisors, where we have, for example, an executive from Vodafone, and an executive from Pinkpop, the annual festival in Landgraaf – 66,000 people. And also a director from the city hall. So, these guys in combination with our board, plus Wim’s enthusiasm and the work I do… we have a lot of weight now.
A: How long ago did Vodafone get on board?
J: A little less than a year ago. It was a trigger to get these people involved. They pushed us to get open because otherwise our project would stay a dream. Vodafone and some other companies put in some money, and we were allowed to use the building from the city hall…. I have to say that it is this lobby that did it in the end because you can talk and talk but no one will give you any money if they’re not sure that they’ll get something out of it. They have to trust you. Now at least we are able to convince people that we’re doing something that is working. And then came the proposal to do a festival on the market.
A: How did that go?
J: For us, it was a year too early. But with all our volunteers and free hands, we put it all together with three-four people. It was the perfect opportunity to make everybody see that it’s possible in Maastricht. It’s a city where pop music is necessary. We wanted to organize it really well and professionally. That was the main part. The [Bruis] festival went very well. There could have been more people, but I think we had about five, maybe six thousand people.
A: Are you going to have a festival every year in September?
J: Yeah, we have to set a new date. We’ve started a bit sooner than last year because then we only had a definite OK from the city hall six weeks before and we had to do everything in a very short time. And it was also the first time so we also had to ask ourselves: “What do we have to think about? What do we need?
We signed everything ourselves. We had a stage from Aachen and were also working with a sound company. They helped us put in the gear here at Muziekgieterij…. We told them: if you help us now, we’ll help you in the future.
They put in the sound and the light show for the festival, and I put in some very skilled technical personnel – my guys, the guys I work with. And, yeah, suddenly, there was a festival [laughs], and it was really great….
What I like about the work is that you start with nothing and you come somewhere. Take the market square for example: it’s empty. And you start and build. A good production is finished when it’s empty again, and everything went well. With a team of guys, building something, doing a show, and everybody… [here Jan made a couple gestures that indicated “rocking out”: he raised his hands, made a sound like an audience cheering, and said “yeah!”] Then breaking everything down, and putting it back in the trucks and go home. And drink a beer. That’s great, that’s what I like. It’s also what I like about making music in a band because you are with five or six guys, or ten or whatever…. You start with nothing and create something.
A: Tell me about the facilities here and your plans for them.
J: We’re going to have a third rehearsal room. And you have the hall where the concert is going on at the moment, where we’re going to do some workshops – sound technician workshops and stuff like that. We’re expanding. We have a DJ Lab that’s going to be in the cellar. And we’re going to build two rehearsal rooms in the cellar…. There’s a lot of space that’s not used right now. We have a record company downstairs.
A: How many people work here?
J: We have about fifteen people that work a lot. I almost live here. I work about 50-60 hours a week. And we have about 40 volunteers that work once in a few weeks. And for the festival, we had probably 60-70 volunteers that did some work. Everyone put in a hand….
The volunteers do some bar work and some cleaning work. Some of them come here three-four hours in three-four days. Some come here three days in a row. There are a few people who are very enthusiastic, and they like it very much here ….
We’re now working on trying to get some structure in our organization. You have Wim – that’s our Director. And I’ll do the programming for bands – mostly the bands stuff – just making sure this place is running. And then we have Jeroen [Soudant]. He’s doing lights right now at the stage concert. He’s a DJ. He’s going to do the dance program. And besides that, he’s… scheduling the rehearsal rooms for the bands and stuff like that – making contracts. So, he’s going to be very busy with that. The dance programming is the nice part of the job, finding good DJs and putting up a good party.
A: Does it cost the bands anything to play here?
J: No, no, no. We pay them. They get a small fee: from 50 to 150 euros.
A: How much does it cost to rent out the rehearsal spaces?
J: 20 euros in the evenings and weekends. In the future, it’s going to be a little bit more expensive because this rate is far too cheap.
A: It’s really cheap! That’s for three hours, right?
J: Yeah. I know that in Amsterdam, you pay 12 euros an hour and you’re in a very small cellar with four people. We make a difference for bands that have a contract and come here every week and bands that just call and just rehearse once a month or once every two months. For the contracts, it’s 80 euros a month: once a week; twelve hours of rehearsal.
A: Is there anything else that I should know about Muziekgieterij?
J: It’s very important, in our philosophy, that this underground of bands get a lot of support because there are more than a thousand bands out there, and a few, maybe five, of the thousand come up to the top. But if the big companies don’t have the underground where they can look and fish in the pond…, if the underground cannot present itself, and if the bands don’t have a place where they can work and be creative, then there is nothing coming up. So we have to support that, and we are positioning ourselves as a talent stage. We are going to look for new, young bands, and try to get them together.
We want to have Belgian bands come over here. Because if you go like three miles across the border, there’s a great pop culture in Belgium,with a lot of great bands. They all are original and it’s really great. You have a band called The Kill Buds. It’s f*** Rock ’n Roll! They break down the place when they play. That’s where bands from here can learn a lot.
Fivestrings performing “Room Service” at Muziekgieterij Maastricht
If you live here in the south of Holland and you go to Amsterdam – people say: ah, that’s the farmer from the south – “de boer”, they say. But if we go to Belgium, they say: ah, it’s Holland; they are Hollanders.
But we’re not Dutch; we’re something in-between…. We‘re more Belgium than we‘re Holland. All day people here in Maastricht listen to 3FM, but many listen to Studio Brussels and that’s far more interesting. There’s a big difference in the music industry of Holland as compared to Belgium.
In Belgium, as a band, you have the possibility to say: now we go; we book a studio; we’re going to make a CD, a great CD; and we’ll go to Studio Brussels and give our CD. And we’ll get airplay.
If you try to do that in Holland, forget it. It’s too regulated. They have their program, and it’s mainstream radio…. So you get all this very boring music, because it’s all the same. You have… all this crap. If Dutch bands want to do gigs in Holland and make some money, they have to be on that radio station. They have to do it if they want to live on it. Everything’s going mainstream, and everything’s a little bit the same. That’s the big difference between Belgium and Holland.
That’s why in Belgium, all these cool, interesting, creative bands are coming every year again…. You have great bands in Holland, but nobody knows them…. And for these bands that are playing here right now, places like the Muziekgieterij in Maastricht are the only normal stage where they can do a normal rock concert… because otherwise they’re in a bar, they’re in a café.
By Amrit Dhir
Amrit Dhir is pursuing a masters in Media Culture at the Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Originally from Los Angeles, he received his bachelors degree in International Studies from Emory University in Atlanta.
Visit of the Muziekgieterij facilities with Jan Sluijsmans (in Dutch)
More information:
Muziekgieterij
Bankastraat 3
6214 XN Maastricht
tel: 043-3433337
website: www.Muziekgieterij.nl
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