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  • Tunes for the Wounded

    CMI177

    Artist: Foundation Hope

    Label: Cold Meat Industry

    ‘Tunes for the wounded’ can be considered a lament. It is a defamatory accusation to the world and it’s suffering. Foundation hope lodges complaints through gritty ambient-industrial structures, broken sounds and despairing moods. Always without losing touch with the beautiful and melodic. Always with that tiny bright spark of hope, overshadowed by doubt and cynicism.


    This successor to ‘The faded reveries’ is a little more harsh. Incorporated are distorted guitar drones, tape-decks, broken strings and noisy outbursts. Firmly rooted in reality, this is tears dropping slowly, a herd crawling through mud and blood, and a call to a redeemer who isn’t there.

    ‘That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.’

  • The Faded Reveries

    CMI162

    Artist: Foundation Hope

    Label: Cold Meat Industry

    Foundation Hope was formed in 2003 by Joep Smaling. The main idea was to make dark cinematical soundscapes with a strong focus on the harshness and cruelty of everyday life. This instead of the more common ambient focus on a fantastical or subterranean world. Foundation Hope tries to reflect the sharp contrast between religious/illusory thought and the crudeness of everyday reality and mankind musically. Ironically presenting itself as a foundation, an institute that comforts seeking souls in times of distress, it is instead an attempt to confront the listener with moods of isolation, despair and sorrow. At the same time it is a question on what the fundaments of our hope are, in times when not only parts of the world are at war or otherwise suffering, but also wealthy individuals in western secularised civilisation seek relief in anti-depressants and are aware of the hollowness of consumerism and hedonism, living in a world gone mad without the belief in a purpose to it all. Foundation Hope is an aural arrow pointing to the spiritual sores of this modern civilisation. ‘To perceive evil in where it exists is in fact a form of optimism,’ to quote Rossellini.

    This was the basic, albeit somewhat pretentious, idea behind the project. Luckily, music speaks no language and can induce mood and feeling directly. So listeners might as well abandon the whole idea behind Foundation Hope and interpret the drones, strings, melancholic tunes, confusing vocal-samples and cinematic mo...