Last month Fuzzy Dreamer, a.k.a. Gerben van ‘t Hag, released his second EP, I have seen you in many places. It’s a gem of minimalist guitar music. A hidden gem, because Gerben doesn’t do social media, and he’s not too concerned with pushing his work to the masses. Having a very similar attitude towards my own creative endeavors, I understand his inclination. Yet, I also believe his music deserves to be heard by more people, so this article is an attempt at musical pollination: I am going to tell you to listen to his music. I will also tell you why.
The first time I met Gerben was in April of 2018 in a rehearsal space where he was part of the band Moonwatch, at that time, still without singer. I had found an ad on a local website (actually, my mom found it), and followed my intuition to find this group of Dutch dudes spacing out to reverb drenched guitar riffs that could go on forever and ever – I liked the situation. I didn’t know if they liked me, but they didn’t explicitly tell me not to show up again, and since I was in dire need of some weekly structure and musical expression at that point in my life, I simply continued arriving to practice. After some time – and several correct name-drops of my favorite bands later – I could sense they grew to appreciate my presence and contribution. We have been rehearsing, performing, and recording music together for the past 8 years. I have described them as angels before. They don’t know that. But the fact that I could count on Thursday night band practice to sing my heart out into space with awesome musicians has been an enormous blessing to me.
For the first couple of years, I couldn’t really gauge who Gerben was, as a person. He didn’t reveal much about himself. He seemed to enjoy playing, but kept fairly quiet during rehearsals. I couldn’t get a full sense of what motivated him to drive from Wageningen to Utrecht every single Thursday. Over the years, he slowly began revealing more and more of who he was. He started sharing brilliant demos with us. (He gave the band his demo of one of my all-time favorite Moonwatch songs: A Sun Came Up.) He also proved to be the best name-giver of songs… Some of you may not know how important this is, but when you have a slacker working title for a song (like “spacy tuesday 2” or “fuzzding” or “gaze mess”) you get stuck with that. And it’s really very hard to change the name at a later stage. So, Gerben’s method is to simply give them a beautiful title from the beginning. It’s almost like a spell: Believing in something at the point of inception.
In the summer of 2023, when everyone else was on vacation, he and I spent some rehearsal time jamming together when I was suddenly hit by the essence of his musicianship. Some guitarists are really good commanders of their instrument. Some guitarists also manage to collaborate with their instrument to lay bare their soul. The rehearsal space turned from a grimey fungus infested dungeon to a sacred space where reverence was in order. I suddenly understood the magic of musical chemistry, which is a matter of energetic resonance. When you are so lucky to find yourself in musical communion with another person like that, it’s a nearly psychedelic state. Something alters, exceeding the sum of parts.
Gerben is an exceptionally evocative guitarist to sing with. I always hear lines over his playing, without effort, in a completely organic flow. That’s probably because he plays in an organic flow, which feels effortless. Gerben, Timo Klok, and I have been working together on a musical side project named: A Million Years to Get Here (Yeah, Gerben came up with that name as well.) And we just released some very DIY home recordings of a few of the song-shapes we captured during our many hours of improvising soundscapes together. It’s titled: Argus, and you can find it here.
With Fuzzy Dreamer, Gerben released his first EP in 2022, The Light Of The Synthetic Sun. On his second EP, I have seen you in many places, he continues to deepen his relationship with his craft. He writes about the process on his Bandcamp page:
The vision for this EP was simple: I wanted to let my playing shine through, so I wanted to record without edits in the takes, do as much in 1 take as possible, and record with real amplifiers. Additionally, I wanted to capture the stereo nature of my rig as best I could.
This turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined. The journey up to this EP took about three months of sonic experimentation, trying out different gear configurations and setups. All the work paid off and I’m very happy with the result, especially the stereo image. So grab your headphones, go to your stereo, take a deep breath and let the tracks do the rest.
I have had the pleasure of witnessing Gerben play Fuzzy Dreamer shows several times, always mesmerizing audiences with his meditative guitar loops. When I hear him play, I feel like he invites us, the audience, to gaze inward, breathe a little deeper, sit still, and feel whatever wants to arise within us. In a world of overproduced, perfection driven, AI infested, consumption-oriented sound, his ambient compositions and rich home recordings are a testimony to the human spirit. And his human spirit is luminous. It’s the realest thing. In our current age; that matters.
Find his records here and here. Follow his band pages. Share with your friends. Put on your playlists. Play in your car, cafe’s, community hubs. Break out of your algorithms. Support independent artists. And as he said: “let the tracks do the rest.”
Cover image for this article is the cover art for Fuzzy Dreamer’s EP I have seen you in many places.
Metaphysical Mulch 