COMPANY OF STATE

Guitar and electronics-violence from Leuven in the eighties.

The band made it's debut on a self-founded label in 1983 with the double single (Dark/Discipline - Dance Remonition/Here as I Am), and from the start was a duo that consisted of Rudolf Hecke and Paul Taes, in which the first went wild on guitars with all kinds of feedback en distortion, and the others freaked out on vocals, all this with a heave bumping rhythm-box in the background. According to the book "Wave in België" Hecke did claim to "have spent years in a room that was completely painted black, listening to the tunes of Edith Piaf en Joy Division".

With this kind of pedigree, it was only logical that the band landed in the stable of Ludo Camberlin and his label Antler, though Anything But Productions, where likewise groups such as Neon Judgement, Poésie Noire, Aimless Device, Men 2nd, A Split Second ... were the "crème de la crème" of the Belgian dark & danceable underground scene that reigned Leuven in those days. Ludo Camberlin also did the production of the first (more or less) long-player "Still in the Flesh" of 1984 (with a plan of the cemetery of Père Lachaise on the cover). The album was recorded completely on 4-track and included a version of the Lou Reed-written Velvet-Underground SM-classic "Venus in Furs".

Ludo Camberlin said about the band in 1985 in "Mad in Belgium" : "My work as a producer differs hugely from band to band. To name two extremes : the Neon Judgement come to the studio with only an idea, with a rough piece of music that needs to be molded into a song ... another thing is Company of State, who come to the studio with a very detailed song; here comes a bridge, there comes a guitar, etc ... but they have very little studio-experience, so they leave the recording side completely to me. They make the songs."

In 1988 they presented their first full-length LP, in a production of Poésie Noire's Jo Casters. Together with Herman Gillis (Passion of a Primitif, Poésie Noire, later a.o. with Volt, and still later the inventor of the "Sherman Filterbank"), they put a huge Poésie Noire-stamp on the group and made the music evolve into a more "poppy", yet still dark and heavy dancemusic.

After another maxi "Metal Moves", the tandem Taes-Hecke broke in two parts. Rudolf Hecke first went solo for a number of years (with the album "God is Dog spelled backwards" etc ..) and then came to the forefront with the psychedelic popgroup "Pop in Wonderland" and singer Meredith.

Band members :
- Rudolf Hecke : guitar, violin
- Paul Taes (Butcher backroom) : vocals, synthesizer

Albums :
- Dark / Danse Remonition (EP, State Rec., 1983)
- Still in the Flesh (MLP, Company Of State, 1984)
- Crawling from the graves (Maxi, Soundwork, 1987)
- Drowning in Fire (LP, Antler, 1988)
- Metal Move (Maxi, Antler, 1988)

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