** 2026 Stock ** Postcards from Arrakis is a key transmission from the wildly inventive world of BeNe GeSSeRiT, reissued on vinyl by Belgian label Everything Is Shit Records. First recorded in 1982–1983 and issued on cassette in 1983 by Dutch imprint Ding Dong, then revived on tape in 2018 by Waving Hands, this edition finally gives the album a full LP treatment, underlining its status as a cornerstone of low‑budget, high‑imagination European minimal wave. The duo – the Trazegnies‑born couple Alain Neffe and Nadine Bal – use the “Arrakis” of Frank Herbert’s Dune less as a literal reference than as a mood: desert‑dry drum machines, shifting mirages of synth and tape, and voices that seem to arrive as half‑decoded radio traffic from some DIY spice planet.

By the time of these recordings, Neffe and Bal were already thoroughly entangled in the Belgian cassette underground. Alain was running the cult Insane Music label, home to his own projects (Human Flesh, Pseudo Code, Subject, Cortex, I Scream, Japanese Genius) and to international fellow travellers like Algebra Suicide, Tara Cross, Colin Potter, Portion Control, The Legendary Pink Dots, Diseño Corbusier and X‑Ray Pop, often presented in his imaginatively packaged Insane Music For People and Home‑Made Music For Home‑Made People compilations. Nadine, for her part, channelled theatricality and a feel for ensemble work in Ornament & Crime Arkhestra. BeNe GeSSeRiT was their most intimate and unfiltered collaboration: songs and sketches mostly self‑released or scattered across compilations from labels such as EE Tapes, Stroom, Minimal Wave and Calypso Now, made in living rooms and home studios rather than “proper” facilities.

On Postcards from Arrakis, you hear that domestic surrealism at full strength. Neffe’s backing tracks are minimal but never inert: cheap rhythm boxes that lurch rather than march, synth lines that suddenly, briefly bloom into bittersweet melody, tape splices and found noise that jab at the edges of the stereo image. Over and through this, Bal sings, declaims, mutters and invents. English rubs shoulders with invented languages; sense dissolves into sound and then snaps back again. As Alain described their process in a 2012 interview, there is almost no pre‑planning: Nadine puts on headphones, he presses record, and the lyrics emerge in real time, “just words like that, expressing some sort of emotions.” Sometimes they grow out of “exquisite corpse” texts scribbled together on holiday or while waiting for food in a restaurant; sometimes they’re resurrected from old notebooks; often they are pure, momentary catharsis.

That lack of stylistic censorship is what makes Postcards from Arrakis feel so uncannily fresh decades later. The record roams freely between minimal synth, skewed chanson, absurdist sound poetry, proto–lo‑fi industrial and something like sitcom music beamed in from another planet, without ever stopping long enough to be pinned down. Each track is a small, self‑contained “postcard”: a scene, a character, a mood, dispatched quickly and then left to echo in the listener’s head. The lo‑fi edges, rather than dating the music, only reinforce its core premise – that spontaneity, humour and emotional pressure are more important than fidelity or polish.

This 2022 LP reissue doesn’t attempt to tidy any of that away. Instead, it frames Postcards from Arrakis as what it has always secretly been: a crucial document in the story of European DIY electronics and one of the most distinctive manifestations of the Neffe/Bal universe. For long‑time followers of Insane Music and for newcomers drawn to the stranger corners of minimal wave and post‑punk, it’s an invitation to revisit an album where two people, a handful of machines and a refusal to self‑edit proved more than enough to conjure an entire, oddly hospitable desert world.