Love, friendship and the social power of relationships – these are the themes running through Bozar this autumn. With the Belgian duo schntzl, we trace the same line in music. Hendrik Lasure (piano and electronics) and Casper Van De Velde (drums and electronics) founded schntzl when they were still students. Their starting point? Cinematographic chamber music with improvisation. Between the creation of three award-winning albums, they also worked on other projects, including Warm Bad, the An Pierlé Quartet and Bombataz, but even these were mostly in tandem. "I will soon be playing with Casper Van De Velde for 15 years. First, we played in bigger jazz ensembles together but the band schntzl has been around for about ten years," Lasure says. Reasons enough for a birthday special?   

They are both huge admirers of living legend Carl Stone, who experimented with electronic music and turntables back in the 1980s, and has worked with Bill T. Jones and Takashi Harada, mainly in Japan. “My first introduction to Stone’s music was the 1990 album Mom’s,” Lasure says. “I was immediately moved by its atmosphere. It feels like each track was made with very little raw material, making the musical world very singularly defined.”

Schntzl’s use of live sampling is influenced, in turn, by Stone’s more recent music. “Several years later, Carl Stone's music crossed my path again because Casper let me hear something from a more recent album Stolen Car. This album is much wilder, more active and bombastic. Both Casper and I have a set-up where we record sounds live on stage, which we can then use as samples in the improvised music,” explains Lasure. Thus, the duo creates space for happenstance, as in a waiting room of the unexpected.  

“It doesn’t hurt to ask”, Lasure and Van De Velde must have thought when they contacted Carl Stone to remix their EP Amsterdam. The answer was no, but they kept in touch. And now, the longed-for collaboration has finally come to fruition, in a cross-generational project with an ear for sonorous detail and a sense of adventure. Thus, the timeless tandem becomes an unstoppable tricycle. The duo becomes a trio. The little unexpected becomes the big unknown. 

Schntzl & Carl Stone play the Terarken Hall on 8 November. Book your tickets here.