ZERO HAPPY CAMPERS

Zero Happy Campers are a band, as rare as it may be. Though they are three, one should add a fourth member. More about it in a minute!

Although formed in The Hague, The Netherlands, during Covid-19, the rhizomes of their musical aesthetics naturally begin much earlier – the latest in each member’s adolescence, when an odd mixture of present and past cultural values and momentary broadcast vogues hit their testoterized brains: guitarist Gonçalo Oliveira coming from a gritty style of rock playing, fused into extended guitar techniques, drummer Felician Erlenburg having focused his psychological loss throughout most of his musical upbringing on jazz and the illusion of freedom in improvised music and Gregor Connelly who is interested in various sound practices and plays synths in the band.

These are but the roots of their musical puberties and they tell us little about the resulting music. The alchemical pots of semi-structured compositions have been cooking up something, and it could be described like this:

From the perspective of a listener – a certain type of listener that is – a variety of popular, rhythm-based genres and their playfully deconstructed elements will be heard, among other things, elements from punk rock, post-punk rock, EDM and ambient musics and the ambiguously kept non-secret of ubiquitous improvised drone jams based on just a few chords and usually culminating in a sort of ecstatic or destructive release (depending on the momentary psychological disposition).

In a view concerned with the interrelation between society and music, Zero Happy Campers would say that their music aesthetically mirrors a culture adrift. In plain words: the music sounds discordantly fractured because “society” is, which is to say: we are.

Not least due to geographical distance, the band members have been forced to work on short-term improvised music sessions of high work intensity and do much of their post-production via the internet. The medium is the message. And the mode is too.

Zero Happy Campers are a work in progress, like everything creative, but despite the change and pressuring flux of fast transforming tools and conflicting cultural signs abound, the aim of the band is to stay close to content and form. There is a very generous share of space granted to the element of our fourth mand bember: osach… I mean band member: chaos.

May its natural force shine its dark light upon us from below and counter the sucking pull of the world around us.