Guy Segers
present

 

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PJ:

September 1997

 

Guy maybe you could start by giving us a little bit about your background here in Brussels.

 

 
GS:

I started as a musician in the late-sixties playing mostly rock stuff, our first influences were people like Hendrix, the Who. I very quickly discovered bands like Soft Machine, and the free jazz scene like Coltrane, Tony Williams, and Miles Davis. I then started working with better musicians.In the beginning it was very amateurish, but we all started to play much better. We formed bands very similar to bands like Soft Machine. When then discovered a very important band called ³Magma² from France and we made a decision to go for a more roots formed music and that's when we formed Univers Zero. That was the start of the big adventure.

The knowledge of contemporary music was the link to European roots. In fact classical music should have been there but we quickly discovered that classical music had been influenced very much by religion. There were a lot of things that we couldn't do because they were forbidden, so we looked a little further back into the archives and we found out that the popular music was in fact the forbidden music. We made a big mix of all of these things, but we were still a rock band.

 

 

 
PJ:
How many records did you put out with Univers Zero?  
GS:

 

We made five CD's and one maxi-single that was only released in Japan, and we were on a number of compilations.

 

 
PJ:
Did you tour extensively?  
GS:

 

No, we never went to America or Japan, we had plans, but the band stopped playing then. We played throughout Europe and were pioneers for groups from Belgium.

 

 
PJ:

Would you say that Univers Zero has inspired a whole new generation of musicians?

 

 
GS:
No, not exactly . . . of course the musicians whom had been playing with the band later on did other projects, that had similarities. I think most of the musicians here have that naturally. We even discovered other musicians doing similar things to us, but had no idea who we were. I believe that we inspired a whole lot more musicians from abroad than from here.

 

 

 
PJ:

There is definitely a strong underground movement of people who listen to your music. Could you elaborate on why there is such a strong support for artists here in Belgium.

 

 
GS:

Yes I think that that is something very specific to Belgium, not only music but painters and dancers. This is such a small country and it's pretty hard to produce a large scale product. Artists work on things here for a very long time. Then they go abroad and it's so . . . big.

 

 
PJ:

Has the media here been supportive?

 

 
GS:

Well the media here were against us for a very long time. If you were a Belgian artist it would be the last thing on their list, but things are changing now. Still they can't do much for us because what they do is still here in Belgium which is very small.

 

 
PJ:

How many years ago did you make the shift from artist to running your own business with Carbon 7?

 

 
GS:

I first started working on producing other peoples material. The final product of Univers Zero brought us a lot of fame outside Belgium but that was all, it was impossible to survive. I started playing again with different musicians again, completely different styles. Each time I found myself in the band, I found myself in the position of doing all the organizing, then my partner, Allen, who also played in Univers Zero asked me why don't I start an agency to organize all of these concerts. I was doing it anyway, why don't I do it professionally.

I started this agency and very, very quickly I had a lot of bands to work with. Then we thought about recording stuff and then that went very fast as well. Then many people asked us to be on the label, I mean here in Belgium. So we started the label with very good product, very specific, because of the links that I have with musicians here. The profile we were looking at was very high, a lot of originality, also people who can defend this on stage, not only products made, or in the studio.

 

 
PJ:

 

How long has Carbon 7 existed as a record label?

 

 
GS:
Carbon 7 started five years ago . It's a very different business than just playing. On one side the artist, and the other the business. That's something new. After five years we started to have a good balance, a good idea of what that world was including the fact that we are a small country . . . we thought we could also look at other countries, other artists to make known in this county. And so we started the distribution, which is a link with the management and the production . We go from the rehearsals to the studio, everything.

 

 

 
PJ:

How many people work at Carbon 7?

 

 

GS:

Currently there are three persons, we used to have more but it was hard with the money to do it. We didn't get any support from the state so we're very independent, in a way it's a good thing. If we had some support, things would be very different. It's still better to work with a smaller crew that knows what they're doing, it's more efficient.

 

 

 
PJ:

Is there a small business loan program here in Brussels?

 

 
GS:
Yes there are but you have to make a lot of concessions, a little difficult to handle.

 

 
PJ:

Are you currently using the internet at all for the business?

 
GS:
Yes we are involved in the internet, in fact we were the first record label to be on the internet. We think that it is very interesting to reach isolated buyers, because if we go through the regular system they will never know that we exist. It's a great way to reach people who would like to find peculiar, unusual music, if someone in the States for example wants to buy one of our CD¹s, they'll ask their local shop and nobody will know who we are . On the net they know what kind of music they want and they jump in and get in touch with us, and that¹s very important because we are a kind of minority.