Starfish Pool’s music was the sound of my puberty, I can’t say it in a better way. As a 14 years old kid I had a really hard time at home: struggle between my parents, searching for an own identity, bored at school, questioning myself, exploring the sense of life etc. Starfish Pool’s music was the soundtrack for that period in my life. PS: everything ended up well with me :-)

I still remember the moment I discovered his album Amplified Tones at the local music store. No one was interested in this ‘weird’ music. I instantly fell in love with this obscure and lo-fi sounding album although I had never heard of Starfish Pool, I even didn’t now that he was from my own country, Belgium. I discovered a lot of other music by him thanks to my niece’s boyfriend, who was a DJ at the time. I didn’t have a turntable so he put EP 1, 2 and 3 on tape for me, just to name a few. I recorded all his music on a couple of tapes and I was listening to it constantly in my walkman.

This was a whole new and safe world to me: Starfish Pool’s music is quite unique. Very minimalistic, moody, dark and somehow out of this world. This fitted perfectly with my mood. During the years I collected nearly everything produced by this man, and also the stuff by other artists on his labels. What I concluded is that he is capable of producing a lot of ‘genres’. His discography is very versatile: techno, experimental, noise, ambient or electro but always with that minimalistic, hypnotic, and devasting approach. I played a lot of his cd’s to death so I just bought them all again. Insane? No: love.

Koen Lybaert still produces music nowadays under his Ontayso disguise, now more dub-orientated and with ambient influences (certainly on the same quality level of Rod Modell) . Totally different from his earlier work but still with high quality standards. The 24 hours box for example is a masterpiece of chilled, dubbed-out and fragile landscapes. Koen Lybaert will always be a great musical influence to me and I treasure his (now dirt cheap) EP’s and albums as much as my hard-to-find and expensive gems, that’s the least I can say.

A lot of my friends are obsessed with dark and minimal techno but when I tell them about Starfish Pool they say they never heard of him. That’s somehow a typical example of the Belgian attitude: they admire people like Hood, Mills, Ruskin, Surgeon etc (no offence, I like their music too) but they never pay attention to their own backyard. There are a lot of unknown gems to discover on the many early nineties labels from Belgium. Valium, Brain Pilot, Xingu Hill, to name a few artists from those labels like Nova Zembla and KK. Don’t look too far, the gems are just in front of you…