'For Better Days' (ft. Luca Missiaen), first single & videoclip of the new VENTILATEUR album 'Rage De Vivre' (release in 2025 via W.E.R.F. Records)
'For Better Days', the first single of their second album 'Rage De Vivre', shows VENTILATEUR in their most postpunk form. For this song, the band worked together with singer Luca Missiaen (The Christian Club, Barno Koevoet & The Duijmschpijkers) to create a track full of energy and generational angst, yet hope for better times.
Building up from a minimalistic groove to a powerful climax, Missiaen sings about feelings of alienation and despair, a search for connection and meaning. VENTILATEUR taps into the pent up energy in this uncertainty. The song conveys the feeling of being lost or on the sidelines of your own life, while a strange creature seems to be guiding it. You don't recognise it, but it follows you everywhere you go. Throughout the song, a longing for enlightenment resonates. An eagerness to clear the slumbering clouds in your mind.
'For Better Days' originated as an instrumental, built around one of Jasper Hollevoets bass lines, but the band quickly felt this could be one of the songs that would shine with a vocal part. In their long search for a vocalist, the trio was immediately captured by the sound of Missiaens voice as he uses it in his own project The Christian Club. Both the driving pace of the bass and the drums and Luca Missiaen's energetic outbursts are in contrast with the helplessness experienced by the character in the lyrics. The rough and harsh guitar sounds embody the willpower and fighting spirit to grasp life.
When Missiaen agreed to lend his voice to the track, pieces of the song were constructed during several rehearsals. Missiaen wrote the lyrics to 'For Better Days' by himself and, with the band, went on to search for the right melodies and rhythms to best compliment and uplift the instrumental track. Only in the studio did the song reach its final stage, with the tremolo guitar part and the falsetto passage being recorded simultaneously, improvising in tandem. A band favorite, 'For Better Days' perfectly embodies the energy and vibe of the rest of the album – making it a logical pick for first single.
The artwork for the album and singles is provided by Theo Collie. Sharing the hometown of Bruges with the members of VENTILATEUR, Collie makes visual art by painting over old black and white pictures with vibrant colours. He has a great fascination for masks and costumes, which feature heavily in his work. This can also be seen in his work for the single cover art for For Better Days. Inspired by the music and the concepts of the album, he used his known methods and subjects to create several artworks specifically for Rage De Vivre.
VENTILATEUR is an instrumental project combining sounds from the vivid worlds of contemporary jazz and postpunk. The three-piece band, consisting of Iben Stalpaert on drums, Jasper Hollevoet on bass and Daan Soenens on guitar, uses angular rhythms and flowing melodies to construct compositions that embody both contrast and cohesion. Originally from Bruges, the band currently has Ghent as its homebase.
The trio released its self-titled debut EP on 22 March 2019. VENTILATEUR won awards at Fresh Fish, Red Rock Rally and Burgrock that same year and was one of the laureates of the then brand new Sound Track. Thanks to Sound Track 2020, the band received a residency at Het Entrepot in Bruges and a year of professional coaching from VI.BE and other national players in the music landscape.
In 2020, VENTILATEUR joined forces with young Ghent theatre collective Camping Sunset for the performance Happiness. The band composed the soundtrack for the play and also performed it live during the five-week run of the production. The music was subsequently recorded and released under the title A Soundtrack For Happiness at the Brussels label Sentimental.
In 2022, VENTILATEUR released its first full-length album with W.E.R.F. Records. 'Hoofdplaat', titled after the village near the manor house that served as its recording location, is the result of a long process of purification. VENTILATEUR presents the essence of their sound, stripped from all ballast.
VENTILATEUR balances on the border between the ‘niche’ world of instrumental jazz and the accessible world of the pop-rock circuit. From this position, the band aims to bring instrumental music to a wider audience. Apart from being purely intrinsically artistic, the trio's ambition is to excite a new audience for cultural participation and specifically the rich genre of jazz. Through their choice of accessibility within the experimental, the band aims to form a bridge between a wider audience and a musical world still too often labelled as ‘niche’. The musicians not only focus on the club and festival circuit, but have already written soundtracks for some short film projects and are also reaching out to the theatre world.
In its early years, VENTILATEUR was mainly known within the Flemish arts landscape on the Bruges-Ghent-Brussels axis. A soundtrack for Happiness and Hoofdplaat introduced VENTILATEUR to a new audience. Songs from the albums got airtime from Radio 1, Klara and other stations, and singles appeared in national playlists. The band’s music was also picked up by VRT, which used the single Nectar during several programs. In 2023, the band scored their biggest gig yet: Ghent Jazz on a podium curated by their label, W.E.R.F. Records.
VENTILATEUR as a project can count on the support of organisations such as W.E.R.F. Records, Cactus Music Centre, Het Entrepot and VI.BE. The band also has close ties with theatre companies such as Camping Sunset, Compagnie Cecilia and Ontroerend Goed and, of course, numerous connections within the Flemish and Brussels music scene.
Live:
23th October, CC De Leest Izegem (pre-release concert)
29th January, CC HA, Hasselt (pre-release concert)
26th March, Cactus, Bruges
29th March, Jazzcats, Kortrijk
More dates tba
