For the Soul, by Dirk and Dirk

For the Soul

by Dirk and Dirk

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Full Digital Discography

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Get all 20 LaoBan Records releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of For the Soul, That's What You Get, Snow Moon, Come On!, Bloodsports, More Molecules, The Unforeseen, Live in Matsuyama, and 12 more. , and , .

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1.	Frayed Threads 04:41	buy track
2.	What the Silence Carried 05:05	buy track
3.	Ghosts Don't Hum in Tune 02:34	buy track
4.	Burnmark 03:51	buy track
5.	Memory Folds Inward 04:54	buy track
6.	Blood Current 04:02	buy track
7.	Afterlight 03:02	buy track
8.	Embers in the Static 02:55	buy track
9.	A Fabric Called Dirk 06:03	buy track
10.	Sublow 03:58	buy track

about

Voor De ZIELE is no map. It’s a spinning compass, its needle torn loose, vibrating in impossible directions. You won’t find resolution here—only sonic detonations that pull you further into the vortex. Listen closely, but don’t try to make sense of it. Let it unmake you.

Dirk and Dirk are explorers of sound and chaos, architects of instability. Their music thrives on the unstable, alive in the cracks between precision and disorder. Their bond is a strange glue: instinct, trust, and a willingness to push until something unravels.

This music doesn’t settle. It responds. It leads and listens. Tracks begin and end in disarray, their boundaries smudged, their cores raw and untamed. It is improvisation stripped to its essence, built on singular ideas born, explored, and abandoned in minutes. Nothing lingers, nothing repeats.

The signal arrived at dawn—a flicker in the void, an email too strange to be real. Was it a glitch? A wormhole? A phishing scam written in the language of chance? No. It was something stranger: a message from Dirk to Dirk, a cosmic overlap, two edges of the same name folding into themselves. A handshake through the ether, a meeting of drums and circuits, static and skin.

Dirk Stromberg is a nomad, his sound shaped by restless migration through Europe, the U.S., and Southeast Asia. Constantly uprooted, constantly adapting, his music is the noise of transition, the voice of a shifting identity. Dirk Wachtelaer is a wanderer, rooted in Belgium but lost to Asia for a decade, where he dissolved into its pulse and rhythms, reassembling himself in fragments of sound and being. Two artists in orbit, their paths spiraling closer until chance locked them into collision.
The first meeting was electric: a rehearsal in a studio, where sound erupted like a fuse lit in the dark. Influenced by metal bands, free improvisation, and the kaleidoscopic haze of psychedelia, they found themselves leaning into a visceral language of chaos and fire.

Over years, the collaboration grew. Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore—each performance a new fragment of the puzzle. And then Brussels, four days of raw immersion. One day to tune into the alien air of the room, two days of recording, and a concert—an eruption released as a separate album. Hours of sound created and discarded, carved down into this: a collection of sharpest edges, moments distilled into their most coherent chaos.

The Fryprone and the drums: conspirators, lovers, antagonists. Stromberg’s Fryprone—a hybrid machine of sensors and accelerometers—responds to every touch with unpredictable fury. Wachtelaer’s drums bend rhythm into time-warping, fractal shapes. Together, they fight, they sing, they howl at each other. They merge into a singular, shape-shifting voice.

credits

released October 27, 2025

Dirk Wachtelaer: Drums
Dirk Stromberg: Fryprone

Justin Hegburg: Recording and mixing
James Westgarth Wilkinson: Mastering

Recorded at: Fly Studios

Cover Photo by Inge Verroken

Special thanks to Alec Ilyine

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about

LaoBan Records Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

LaoBan Records is an independent Malaysian experimental music label. The label focuses on releasing improvised experimental music and serves to document a group of artists who have performed and developed together through exchanges made within South East Asia and beyond. ... more