If you listen to the new album "Segovia At The Wheel" by Belgian artist Roland Van Campenhout from the very beginning, you will feel like the "hobo" sung about in the first song. The tracks clatter beneath us in a monotonous, steady rhythm, the most diverse landscapes pass by leisurely and regularly, day turns to night and then back to day. In the middle of it all is the lonely, homeless, permanent traveler, without a destination, but with the firm intention of being "on the road" and shaping his strange existence in this way.
Roland Van Campenhout, the "eternal tramp", will be 81 years old on July 25, and the very first notes of the 12-song kaleidoscope "Segovia At The Wheels" transport the listener into the enchanted atmosphere of its creator. The Belgian master guitarist and singer creates a sound atmosphere that is as sparse as it is mysterious, not unlike Ry Cooder's soundtrack of the century to the Wim Wenders film "Paris, Texas". But it also evokes associations with Captain Beefheart, the master songwriter Tom Waits and the shaman Dr. John.
Roland Van Campenhout is a living legend, the archetype of an almost extinct genre of artist - the sound magician, firmly rooted in blues and folk, but at the same time open to pretty much all genres. As a teenager - inspired by Jack Kerouac's beatnik classic "On The Road" as a philosophy of life - he belonged to a skiffle combo. From the end of the 1960s, the man with the catweazle moustache increasingly turned to the blues, played in Rory Gallagher's band for a while and had a rendezvous with Tim Hardin and Leo Kottke. From 2000, his work led to collaborations with the much younger Belgian crossover artists Sioen and Helmut Lotti.
The artist sees himself in the tradition of the "beatniks", i.e. authors and their Gesamtkunstwerke such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs. He defines his work as "mantra blues with poetic verses" or alternatively as "electronic voodoo swamp with haiku lyrics". The whole thing is independent and cross-genre - psychedelic sounds, jazz à la John Coltrane, the Far East and North Africa combine with the blues in a permanent focus.
With "Segovia At The Wheel", however, the charismatic musician is back to himself and on his own mission. And even if the current songs come from a "non-existent country" - the journey into this imaginary world is definitely worthwhile. "There's a lot of humor in each of the new tracks," laughs Van Campenhout. "On the other hand, the album also describes the story of my musical development. Because I originally come from jazz. And of course from folk à la Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie or Joni Mitchell. On the other hand, I've been traveling around the world for decades. I meet lots of people, make friends, make music with this or that person. So it's inevitable that my sound keeps changing. It would be terribly boring if I stuck to one sound. I'm not interested in creative stagnation."
Although Roland Van Campenhout's father died when the boy was just five years old, "my father influenced me in my work", the Belgian is firmly convinced. "He was a jazz musician, just like my grandfather. I'm absolutely certain that they both influenced and still influence my music."
Ultimately, however, the decisive factor is that "I've always traveled a lot, that being on the road has taken me to the most diverse countries and continents," enthuses the Fleming. "That has never changed. While I was on the road, I was jamming non-stop. My work thrives on this unsteadiness, curiosity and openness. If you travel the world with open eyes and ears and, above all, with your soul, you magically receive an ever-growing spectrum of impressions. You then have to process these in your own songs." This has once again been wonderfully successful on a dozen new compositions that seem wonderfully familiar, especially in their exoticism.
