I arrive in Ostend, Belgium, a city of about 71,000 on the Flemish coast, on a Thursday night. The city's most recognizable landmark is the Casino Kursaal, a hulking neon-lined building housing a gold statue of Marvin Gaye playing the piano. Gaye spent a few years in Ostend in the early '80s, drying out. He wrote "Sexual Healing" there, but after a couple years, he boarded a jet and flew away from the coastal town forever. Still, the statue remains, and Gaye's brief residency is one of the city's main points of pride.

I'm here to interview Ziggy Devriendt, AKA Nosedrip, the DJ and visionary behind STROOM, which is at various times, a record label, an audiovisual radio station and an amorphous brand that can be applied to any number of musical and non-musical objects. Ziggy's lived in Ostend his whole life, save a stint in nearby Ghent.

It's only 8 PM, but the shops and restaurants surrounding the Casino are already shutting down for the night. I hit up Ziggy to make plans to meet the following day. I ask him if there are any record stores in town where we could meet. (No.) I ask him if there is Uber in Ostend, trying to plot my trip to his house. (No.)

"You are at the end of the world man!" Ziggy texts. "That's why it's nice to live here."

Ziggy, 30, has spent the last ten years carving out a life dedicated to beautifully strange music. He launched Belgium's first online radio station, STROOM.TV, with some close friends out of an apartment studio. The experimental radio shows always included a visual element, the combined effect at times humorous, poignant, mundane or psychedelic.

In 2016, Ziggy's bosses at Belgium's oldest record shop, Music Mania in Ghent, asked him to start a record label. Since then, STROOM records have become buy-on-sight affairs for a certain type of music fan: those with an ear for homespun electronic pop made possible by the democratization of synthesis in the '80s; record heads interested in the liminal zone between wave, ambience, post-punk and exotica; and fans of weird yet sublime music compiled with a loving, but unpredictable, approach.

Nosedrip now spends weekends DJing around Europe, but throughout the week, he works at home in Ostend, where I find him on a Friday morning, a few hours before he leaves for a late-night set at Rewire Festival in The Hague. I've never been to Ostend before, but I get an immediate sense of deja vu when I arrive on Ziggy's block. Suburban ennui is unmistakable to a native. Well-manicured lawns. Brick townhouses stacked against each other. Zero traffic. Chirping birds. And there's Ziggy, waving at me.

Though it looks nondescript, the interior of the house Ziggy shares with his partner (STROOM art director Nana Esi) is anything but. A meticulously organized record collection lines the walls between living and dining rooms. It's broken up into highly personal categories, "female voices" being one of the largest. Drawings, artwork and books occupy every available surface.

Nana Esi, Ziggy Devriendt

The last few releases on STROOM have been all over the shop. An album of woodwind-heavy electronic vignettes recorded in 1982 in Brussels by Benjamin Lew, a photographer, visual artist and part-time cocktail bar employee. A razor-sharp synth-pop tune by another Belgian project, Kyoto, from 1984. A split 12-inch of obscure '90s techno featuring Icelandic producer Cold and James Bernard. Widescreen ambient pieces from a contemporary artist, Aponogeton. I ask Ziggy, who looks a bit like pre-mohawk Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver, what ties it all together.

"Not thinking professionally. Being naive. Being disappointed in the music industry. I think that's what all of them have in common," he says. "I'm a big fan of the philosophy of the loser which basically says that only the stories of the winners get told. This is how history comes to be. I love to rewrite history. I can tell the story about a guy like Pablo's Eye whose music is definitely as good as the '90s stuff that was big, but you don't hear about it because he's not a sell-out or the guy who pulled the right strings... He was just gonna disappear into obscurity."

STROOM is not a reissue label in the traditional sense. Though the majority of the music Ziggy releases was made by marginal artists in the '80s, Ziggy prefers to survey an artist's body of work and then weave his own non-chronological compilations.

"I'm not a fan of reissues," Ziggy says. "I would never call [a STROOM release] a reissue. I'm not interested in copying the past, I want to do something else."

Mathieu Savenay is Ziggy's longtime friend and STROOM's in-house mastering engineer. "I admire the way he can take different sounds from different eras and put together a completely new album that totally makes sense," he says, "even though the music spans 20 years."

This historical revisionist bent also applies to STROOM's visuals. In designing the cover for the first Pablo's Eye compilation on STROOM, Esi delved into her personal history. "[Pablo's Eye] are a mixed couple," Esi told Tight magazine. "Like Axel [of Pablo's Eye], the musician, is white and his wife, Marie, is mixed.... My dad, who passed away that year, is black and my mom is white, so the relationships between us became very personal from the beginning. They were like, 'You are completely free to do whatever you want. It is OK even if it is you on the cover.' So it's actually my parents on the cover. I was looking through the photos and accidentally two pictures fell out which were a photo of my mom and dad, and I thought: 'Wow, I've never seen this picture of my mom and dad like that.' I scanned that and started working with the transparency, I was placing them on top of each other, and suddenly I got the image as you see it now."

This emotional blurring of the past and the present, the personal and the professional, is central to the STROOM ethos. "It feels more like social work than cultural work," Ziggy says. "To be clear, I don't mean social work like helping the sad, I just mean working socially." Ziggy prefers projects where the artists become trusted confidants. "They're still people I hear from. That's super nice. Also, I have the feeling when a compilation is finished, when there was close contact, those are the best ones."

In work and life, Ziggy retains a healthy suspicion of outsiders. "I prefer to work with a close circle," he says. "I could probably open it up more and be more commercial and try to network, but if I don't have someone that I trust that guides me into it, I'm not gonna do it."

For Ziggy, the people he trusts most are those working alongside him on STROOM. He describes the core STROOM team (Esi on visuals, Saveney the mastering engineer and his intern Victor De Roo, one-half of STROOM act Vanderschrick) as functioning in ideological lockstep. "It's amazing," he says. "Everyone is totally free to do what they want to do, we never clash." Esi concurs. "We're very in tune with each other," she says.

Mathieu Saveney, Victor De Roo

STROOM's trademark mix of sound and visuals came together organically in its pre-label radio days, when Esi would quickly throw together visuals for the 24-hour streaming station STROOM.tv, where Nosedrip, Savenay and other friends regularly DJ'd. "Jamming is a good description of what we do, because you're trying things out and then by coincidence you find things that work in synchronicity with what you're talking about or thinking about," Esi says. "It was also like that when the studio was still there and we were still a radio station. People would come over and things would just happen."

Ziggy speaks about STROOM's first release, a soundtrack to the Belgian animated film, Jan Zonder Vrees, in a peculiar manner. He tells me how composer Alan Pierre's original tapes were like spaghetti, how they spent days rolling them back up into a usable form. "There was a lot of STROOM inside the release," he says.

Throughout our conversation, Ziggy is hesitant to pin STROOM down. "STROOM can be objects, STROOM can be a restaurant. It's more of an attitude almost," he says.

"You need some vagueness to be able to be flexible," Esi says. "You can't keep too much mystery because then people get annoyed by the fact that they actually don't get what you're doing. And if you constantly have to explain what you are doing then it's not functional. But for every identity STROOM has had up till now, including an online video radio station, events and a label, it has always been quite clear to people what the main goal was. But the way we dress the identity should be able to change. It's never like, 'Now we're gonna stop the radio and we're gonna start a label,' or something."

Ziggy runs the label in a way that's both pragmatic and ambitious. "Virgin has been the biggest influence of how I run STROOM. Being able to use a brand for everything gives me the freedom, that's how I would really love to run things," he says. "If I had more money, I would do things the same but differently. I would immediately start a restaurant here in Ostend with the name STROOM, I would start a CBD shop named STROOM."

If Nana is STROOM's artist, Savenay the collective's technician, then Ziggy is, well... "I look at myself like a businessman," he says. " Like really, but in a funny way, that was why it was important to release Patrick Selinger's 'Businessmen,' because it's my mantra for the last five or six years. Because it's depressing, it has this whole double layer to it."

Despite his tongue-in-cheek approach to his CEO role, Ziggy is always closing. When approaching musicians he's interested in working with, he's never been turned down. Despite the obscurity of much of the music STROOM works with, most of the label's records sell relatively well. "He's a merchant," Esi says. "He could sell anything if he's convinced about the product."

Reading all this, Ziggy might come off as a self-important character who meddles with obscure discographies and won't take no for an answer. This couldn't be further from the case. He goes about his work like a dutiful salaryman, intent on killing his ego and reminding himself of the inconsequential nature of success on an underground level.

"Even if you're successful and sell 1,500 or 2,000 records," he says, "that's nothing, really. I constantly work with people who made music in the '80s and '90s they sold ten, twenty thousand and these are the underground artists. Fuck off, put your ego away, it doesn't mean much."

Ziggy also applies this self-effacing attitude to his DJing. He covers his face with a goofy, hand-drawn smiley in most promotional photos. "The DJing itself is not it," he says. "The preparation, that's the fun part. Sometimes I see DJs really enjoying themselves, not even from an ego standpoint, but just being in that place makes them happy. I've never had that feeling." He seems to enjoy the stimuli of travel most. "I just like the puzzling part. I like the fact that you walk around in a world with 10,000 different impulses and you try to absorb it."

Nosedrip is a phenomenal, unconventional DJ. He's made over 200 radio shows and the success of STROOM is at least in part due to the 30,000-strong following he's built on Mixcloud. Nosedrip might be the closest thing our scene has to a faceless, pure radio DJ, though the "selector" culture of the moment allows him to play clubs and festivals.

"My radio show has been my therapy," he says. "It's the thing I do on a monthly basis, I need to get it out of my system. Many of my followers are creative people who use it in the background. I know a lot of writers who use it. Painters, graphic people, people who don't have to use their ears while working. Over 50 times different people have came to me saying they use it in that creative process and I think it's quite nice. I'm happy with that."

Regardless of the international following he's built through his label and DJing, Ziggy is happy living a simple, unconventional life in Ostend. "I couldn't live in a big city because I would become overstressed, and I couldn't live here if it wasn't for music, he says. "I basically live in two worlds. On the weekend I go to cities, I see people and I go to record stores and I see all this stuff that's happening. Then during the week, I'm here and it calms me down. It's also a reality check."

###

Its past midday in Ziggy's quiet neighborhood. He busies himself getting ready for that night's gig. I step out onto the balcony. Sprinklers keep backyards green, a dog barks in the distance. I get the sense that Ziggy's neighbors have no idea what he does and that he prefers it that way. I go back inside and flip through his records, gravitating towards the myriad of post-punk and wave sections. I come across a Marine Girls record and Tracey Thorn's 1982 solo LP, A Distant Shore. I comment on Thorn's work with Marine Girls, solo and Everything But The Girl, and note that he used her song "Small Town Girl" on a mix I loved.

"I'm not a girl but it feels very personal," he says. "Because like this small town girl, I live here in Ostend. I'm not a cosmopolitan guy, you know?"

I ask him what he meant about living in Ostend being a reality check.

"Belgium is not big enough. The idea that you can live and have a career here by doing what you like to do is impossible and absurd. So the only thing you can do is create it for yourself."

Label of the month mix

This two-hour mix from Ziggy Devriendt includes a trove of unreleased STROOM heat.

Tracklist /
BeNe GeSSeRiT - On protege bien les reguins (STRLP-002)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
Jo Bogaert - So Obscene (Forthcoming)
Ramuntcho Matta - Ne (Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
Pablo's Eye - Double Language (STRLP-012)
Ingus Bauskenieks - Kur Tu Esi? (STRLP-015)
Pablo's Eye - Louisaida Dub (STRLP-022)
Vanderschrick - Ongehoord (STR7-018)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
Jason Kolar - Erratic Texting Behavior
Vazz - Breath (STRLP-030 *Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
Vazz - Cascais (STRLP-008)
Shakti - Shanah (STREP-028 *Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
Ruins - Elegant Shout (STREP-023)
Patrick Selinger - Businessmen (Vox Version) (STR12-016)
19 gadi pirms sakuma - Aspekti (STRLP-??? Forthcoming)
June11 - Lahore (STRLP-005 Bonus)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
NSRD - Plava (STRLP-003)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
TRJJ - Planet Subaru Alley (STRLP-029 *Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
??? - ??? (Forthcoming)
Absent Music - The Monkey House (STRLP-005)
MCBN - Nympho (STR008)
Benjamin Lew - La magnifique alcoolique (STRLP-027 Forthcoming)
Aponogeton - Consolation for Martiska (STRLP-024)
Annelies Monsere - Untied (STRLP-017)