Solina Lapsus
Solina Lapsus is the duo of Dieter Durinck and Jan Laroy. They made a synth jam tape together last year, which came out on Social Harmony.
Solina Lapsus will play at Theresia (Ghent, Belgium), July 1st 2023. Part of a three-day special service at Theresia for its final season in the holy Ghentian shrubbery ~ KRAAK selects three duo acts to perform their respective rites for the summer daze. Magical times await in these monastic secret gardens, come shoeless for our last show before summer break.
“I spend most of my time making a mess”
I only knew you from your visual work. Is your visual work also your main focus, and music something you do aside?
Jan Laroy: I would call myself a painter mainly for ease of conversation but oftentimes the categorisation feels too much like an arbitrarily placed electric fence so I’d try to avoid putting myself in one sort of category. To answer your question more directly, let’s say I spend most of my time making a mess.
Musically, I only know this one tape you made with Dieter.
This one tape released in December was my first publicly released recording, but Dieter has made and published music in the past. I try not to hold that against him.
How did you get to know Dieter?
We both worked for a company that would build exhibitions for hire for a few months. We missed our ride to the museum we were working on the day we met. I thought he was an odd guy I’d be best to try and avoid, so we started talking. I think any relationship can be turbulent at times. This was around 6 years ago and we keep chugging along.
We went on a trip to Menorca last year, even though I’m more inclined not to travel. Dieter had planned to record a tape there and brought a Casiotone PT-20, that was enough for us to improvise around in between the talayots. Curiously enough, I had never played an instrument until a few months prior, I had somewhat impulsively adopted a Solina A200 (electric organ) from a fellow artist. So when we started jamming in Menorca I had just the tiniest bit of experience. That was enough for Dieter to say we should start playing together when we got back to Ghent.
We started playing by using two electric organs (the Solina I got and a portable Antonelli for Dieter) and tried to explore and have fun, which evolved to us playing quite often which we started recording. All recordings we make are purely improvisational, we can not write, read, or recreate the music we play.
The tape you made sounds clumsy and silly, even amateuristic, and I don’t mean that as anything negative.
We would proudly and wholeheartedly agree with that, somehow you would hope that never goes away, but we are aware of the fact that it’s impossible so we try to keep exploring, and not fight the fact that we’ll get somewhere when we arrive.
How do you remember the recording of this tape?
Excitingly playful and enormously clumsy, we have a lot of unuseable or lost recordings and of course they are somehow remembered as little golden nuggets that have become entirely atmospheric. But we had so many three hours or more improvised sessions which we did record well enough and where we were entirely zoned in that I remember it most as a melodic teleportation.
What does Solina Lapsus mean?
Solina is the brand of the electric organ I mentioned before and lapsus has a few meanings but for me it means getting lost in exploration. But more importantly, Solina Lapsus is fun to pronounce.
Joeri Bruyninckx
Headline photo: Jente Waerzeggers
Solina Lapsus Bandcamp
Social Harmony Bandcamp
