Katharos Foundation

PWOG
katharos foundation
p.o. box 837
5000 av tilburg
HOLLAND

The Katharos Foundation was one of the ACCESS to the Temple of Psychick Youth, created in Tilburg by the former member of the techno act Psychick Warriors ov Gaia (previously known as The Infant and Sluagh Ghairm).

"The Katharos Foundation was established in Tilburg (The Netherlands) in February 1986. Katharos comprises a number of people who are engaged in music, performance, and other activities to emphasize in an explicit and penetrative way their personal search for expression and manifestation of the diversity and complexity of both individual and social life. Some members of Katharos occasionally performed under the name 'Sluagh Ghairm'.

Katharos performed at Metabletica, a visual music event held at V2 in 1986"
[from http://v2.nl/archive/organizations/katharos]

"In 1984 I had just moved to Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and I was glad I left Tilburg, a university town with a pretty big appetite in experimental/weird stuff. I used to be in several bands there, influenced by all kinds of industrial music (Einsturzende Neubauten, Sprung Aus den Wolken, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire…), producing a kind of sonic & cultural (& political) anarchy. Around 1984/85 scenes & bands were torn apart when a weird kind of post/neo/religious/tribal/pseudo-artistic/therapeutic/occult/sex-death fundamentalism came to blossom. I remember half of my scene digging into this new age crap, reading Austin Osman Spare, Allister Crowley, Georges Bataille and Genesis P. Orridge. Digging through my archive I just found a magazine some of my friends produced in the eighties, called SILENCER, published by KF, Katharos Foundation – on the cover Genesis is looking at me with a grim face, wearing a bone on his shoulder. Anyway, I never liked that stuff, felt it was pseudo-scientific bullshit, didn’t like the doomy art work and experienced it as a kind of religious fascism or tribal fundamentalism, a kind of unconscious surreal fascism. Maybe if I would have dived deeper in it, I would be more cautious in choosing my words, but I just hated the whole appeal. Maybe I was too rational for it (music & the sonic was my surrealism). (Anyway, some folks of my scene became part of The Temple and later founded the Psychic Warriors ov Gaia – you might remember them). Going through that zine once more I feel that suffocating atmosphere again"

 [from http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2004/12/the-strange-case-of-nicola-vincenzio-crane/]

Silencer No 1 
Editor: Katharos Foundation, Holland 1989, 36 pp, 1989
Temple Ov Psychick Youth-themed fanzine with several articles by Genesis P-Orridge. Also articles on dadaism and Austin Osman Spare. Richly illustrated.  Print run 500 copies. English

''SILENCER is a project initiated by the KATHAROS FOUNDATION for those who do not wish to conform and are in search for information, inspiration, challenge, method and support.

We intend to start an active exchange of information through SILENCER and therefore invita everyone to cooperate and send in articles, visuals, poetry, stories etc...We will accept all informative and challenging entries.

DON'T BE THE AUDIENCE BE THE EVENT! GET INVOLVED!

To make a start SILENCER ONE was born out of personal interests, and gives an indication of what SILENCER is about.

SILENCER TWO will contain a.o. a survey on the French writer/philosopher George Bataille, who is renown for his books discussing the relationship between sex, death and debauch; an introductory biography on the French writer Guy Flaques and an anthology of his manual: 'Le Tribunal Correctionel' and a fictional story on totalitarianism.

In order to explore methods of communication and enhance consciousness, SILENCER will appear not only on paper but in many forms like videos, performances etc. and in every possibile combination.

Februari 1989''

"slowly we started getting more acid and new beat records in our tiny record store. But not enough for my taste, cause I was blown away by this abstract stuff, so I started hanging out at a record shop in Tilburg, where the guys of PWOG (Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia) used to work. These guys had everything first! I picked up the first Aphex Twin records there, on unmarked white labels…"
[from Drvg Cvltvre interview]

Some pathetic letters by Genesis P-Orridge claiming copyright infringement on the use of Psychick Cross Logo.
[read here http://genesisporridgearchive.blogspot.it/2009/11/gens-1994-cease-and-desist-to-psychick.html?zx=3986451366ff834e]

''Since 1985 Reinier Brekelmans (a.k.a. Arbe) has been involved in experimental music. Not hindered by any formal training whatsoever he started by banging oil drums with steel pipes and table legs in the small basement of the student house where he lived. There a group of friends, who came to call themselves The Infants, would gather every Sunday afternoon for a session of Post Punk/Industrial-style noisiness with percussions, guitars, tapes, electronics and lots of feedback. Only once they took to the stage in a venue, calling themselves Los Infantilos for the occasion and therefore pulling a crowd from the Caribbean area who were expecting to dance to some salsa-tunes. Instead they had to endure a bizarre art performance with a Factory/Velvet Underground-vibe, complete with a 30 minute rendering of Venus in Furs, a slide show of strange sexual images and a uterus-like glass object that was swinging from the ceiling and gave birth to life-like babies made of red Jello (all visuals/objects by Antoine Timmermans), splatting to the floor and scattering in blobs only to end up being rubbed in the face by the singer (Eric Toornend).
In this underground chaos some structure emerged as most members expressed the desire to have an outlet for their (musical, literary, photographic, etc.) art. The idea to provide an umbrella to put it all under gave rise to the Katharos Foundation, a publishing/producing platform thought-up by Reinoud van den Broek. With little means some cassettes and a magazine were a released and events were organized in Tilburg, among which some of the first (proto-) house parties there. Around ’89 the core activity of KF slimmed down to one project: Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, or PWOG. Reinoud van den Broek, Robbert Heijnen (Exquisite Corpse, XCOR) en Reinier, who after The Infants worked together as Sluagh Ghairm, were fascinated by the new dance events, the mechanisms involved and the possibilities to experiment with those mechanisms.''
[from https://corpsflottants.wordpress.com/previous/]

'' [..] Halfway the decade one of the initiatives was the Katharos Foundation, a loose collective of outsiders, self-proclaimed artists who, by the act of collaboration found a way to express their ideas and thoughts. Besides several multimedia events and concerts, the Foundation published some compilation cassettes, a magazine and a video magazine.
As music was the core activity, the Foundation harboured several bands. One of these projects was Sluagh Ghairm consisting of Reinier Brekelmans and Reinoud van den Broek. At that time the sound was atmospheric, industrial but not particularly aimed at the feet. Inspiration was drawn from a wide range of sources, music from all over the world and of all times, but also from philosophy, science, literature and last but not least nature. One particular notion, amongst others, is that we humans are part of nature,instead of being apart from or above it, Homo sapiens evolved in the same manner and from the same source as did Culex pipiens, the latter being the more successful. A humbling yet liberating and challenging notion that needed to be communicated, at least we thought so then......and, although supposedly wiser, still do.
For the realisation of their ideas they were aided by the musically ever busy Robbert Heijnen who, almost casually and often unasked for, always added something extra and indispensable. Robbert's interest in electronic music made him eager to explore experimental studio set-ups that found a willing ear in us. This collaboration would eventually evolve into PWOG. '' Reinoud van den Broek 
[from https://soundcloud.com/sacred-summits/a1-acid-dervish-1]