Jeugdbrand - 3 × hullo, hullo (2025)

A little mole that digs its way up.
And a bystander that shrieks,
“Huuh, there’s a little mole coming up!?”

The first few minutes of ‘3 × hullo, hullo’ sound like a little mole creeping up through the soil. The little thing hoes and scoops up some sand, building a small pile of dirt. But then, anger... because this drives them mad—those who want their lawns clean and spotless. A clean lawn: a desire we inherited from the Brits. Dumped into our collective consciousness by humorless Victorians who enjoyed having their black pudding on the lawn. An uninspired impression from their misreading of Italian paintings. The lust for sterile gardens nudged the world into water waste and clouds of pesticides.

Well, it went like this: I open the glass door to the garden, the early morning coming to its midday end. That everyday anxiety that overcomes late risers from time to time kicks in. “Fuck, almost half a day wasted!” But abruptly, this sentence in my head gets overdubbed by the Queen’s English: “That shit mole, that blimey shit cunt mole!” I see the expat owner of our Airbnb punching his bare fists on his green lawn. A spotless lawn, but with here and there a few molehills. His grass, like a billiard cloth in a smoked bar, serves as a contrasting pathway to the black volcanic rocks at the back of the house. Behind these rocks, the ocean foams and growls. “Luv, get the poison! I wanna finish the bugger now and for good. Bloody hell!” I watch this scene with amusement, until suddenly, when the landlord notices me, he cleans up his act. “Ooh, these are funny little creatures, eh, these furry moles. Cheeky peng. Eh, fancy a cuppa?” The landlord’s head and belly are so ridiculously red that I can almost hear a lobster scream in a pot of boiling water. He looks like a walking can of Spam, its contents cooked by countless days under the Indian Ocean’s sun. The Indian Ocean, where sharks migrate between Africa and Australia. And where the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist bravely builds new islands of trash. Yes, the very true meaning of re-creation. Someone once told me that lobsters don’t really scream.

Back to our mole. The creature is practically blind. In its head, a pair of eyes perfectly fit for the darkness it is usually stuffed in. Under the surface, there is no light, only smells and sounds. The mole digs through our alarmingly dry soils. Our Flemish lands—we are now leaving the island for a bit, and have arrived in our native Flanders—lands of cement and bricks. If there is still a tuft of green to be found in our oppressive villages, you can be sure that a stuffed truffle with a municipal portfolio will turn it into a drab development for impoverished architecture. Sucking our soils so dry that even another of our wasted wet summers couldn’t begin to be a solution. And so the mole hurts its tiny little digging claws on all the screed it needs to dig through.

When I first heard Jeugdbrand, I had this sensation of “Huuh, there’s a mole digging its way through my green lawn!” And that makes me happy, because I like nature’s way. And this particular mole, this creature, digs with two beautiful pink little claws: Dennis Tyfus on the left and Jeroen Stevens on the right. Being a bit of a music man myself, I can really appreciate the beauty in Dennis Tyfus’ solo piano performances. Me, usually acting like a stuffed truffle when it comes to new music, I adore his short performances piled with farce, stream-of-consciousness storytelling, and a good keystroke or two. But here comes the plot twist. Thanks to Jeroen Stevens, these singular stirrings by Dennis found completion. With his well-schooled musicality, Jeroen adds a shiny polish to Dennis’ metastatic ideas. There is that rare and unconditional love for music that sprays from this record, like the pickled mist above the waves breaking on black volcanic rocks. Yes, that’s right, we’re going back to our island story.

Because after some 13 minutes on Side B, I could swear that I’m listening to the sounds of a tropical night. A tropical night under the Milky Way. The breaking waves in the distance. Two lovers awake. She, reading a book that is set in China. She borrowed it from his brother and is probably not intending to return it. The other is doubting words he said to someone a few weeks ago. On his lap, a stencil-printed tourist guide about a slave castle on the coast of Ghana. Yes, that castle where they shot Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde. He found the guide dreamy because of the lovely printing mistakes. Because of the cute, erratic English. Another severe act of bland whiteness in a moonlit world. These two people, late at night, their kid asleep, are now like the waves. Intoxicated and lush from the sweet tropical scent of lands filled with spices and fruits, their bodies crawl and sweat. Pickled spray on the tongue, the full moon plays Peeping Tom... And then suddenly... swoosh! A fruit bat lands in the top of the tree. The fruit bat looks at her. It pees on her. Its penetrating, smelly piss drips onto her bare left shoulder. And since her touch senses apparently work faster than her smelling senses, she turns around and looks up, because she thinks she feels the first drops of a refreshing rain shower. And exactly when she looks up, her mouth half open, another stream of acid bat piss flows into that mouth. And now she starts to get nervous. “Hey Siri, can you get Ebola from drinking the pee of a fruit bat?” But even Siri doesn’t want to answer this one. And later in the night, unaware of the distress caused by the fruit bat’s unwanted golden shower, something happens. He starts to cry. He cries a blast of tears, suddenly, like a thunderstorm. And as unexpectedly as the clouds broke, his tears wash away. What was that all about? And he remembers that other conversation. How he acted like a complete authoritarian dick to his kid. But now, his strong mind is active and adds new words, more eloquent verbs, and a better syntax. The original mediocre screams are gone. A job well done. A black rock stops that ocean of guilt from floating freely. In the meantime, she pulls an article from the internet. It says bat shit is good for plants. Oh, she got distracted, and now she’s back to Google with the embarrassing question about the pee.

To complete this letter of recommendation, I want to end with a parable inspired by Lydia Davis:

If this mole was a dog,
it could’ve been our dog.
But apparently it is not our dog, because it barks at us.