How to get ahead in Industrial music

A few weeks ago, Lord Bassington-Bassington was asked if he’d like a promotional copy of a demo release from new band from the Netherlands. Always a hound for new sounds, he naturally accepted. And a few days later, a CD by a project entitled Hadewych dumped into the mailbox here at Bassington Manor.

Lord Bassington-Bassington thought there was something familiar about the name Hadewych, and sure enough, His recent studies in Christian mysticism paid off. The name seems to be a reference to the Christian mystic Hadewych of Antwerp, whose poetry contains powerful accounts of her encounters with the divine (see an excerpt from one of her manuscripts below).



The band operates in the Ambient and Industrial genres, with excursions into other genres (check out their sounds here) and, in all fairness, is still a band searching for its own identity. Which, of course, is normal – there are a lot of bands out there like that. What is quite unusual about Hadewych, though, is how the mastermind behind the project has realized that in a musical world where everybody with a computer has a project going on, with MySpace pages and CD-Rs and what have you, a project wanting to be noticed needs to march that extra mile.

So Hadewych’s demo comes in a hand-made wooden cover with a cloth inlay and loose inserts, as seen on the picture below. To top the already very stylish effect off, instead of a normal mailing envelope, the CD was sent in a cardboard wrapper with real leaves as filler material. When opened, this filled Bassington Manor with the scent of an autumnal forest, making Lord Bassington-Bassington’s nose quiver.



In a time where record companies have no clue how to make people buy their ugly pieces of plastic (the jewelcase has always been a plague on mankind), bands such as Hadewych makes Lord Bassington-Bassington remember why he started buying records in the first place. He will be following the further adventures of Hadewych with great interest.