Before Liaisons D existed as a studio project, it was two hours of specialist radio: Sven Van Hees and Paul Ward's late-night show on Antwerp's S.I.S. station, broadcasting a mix of EBM, house, new beat, acid and Detroit techno from 1985 onward. The name itself was borrowed from Liaisons Dangereuses, the German-French duo whose 1981 track "Los Niños del Parque" had already primed half of Belgium's DJs for the pitched-down 33rpm trick that would become new beat.
By 1989, the radio show had turned into a studio project, and Van Hees and Ward weren't working alone. Jan Van Den Bergh, Frank De Wulf and Marcos Salon all passed through the Liaisons D sessions, cut for USA Import Records — the in-house label of the Antwerp record shop of the same name, a hub that fed vinyl and gossip in equal measure to the city's new beat scene.
Selected Works, the reissue label USA Import Music has now pulled from that catalogue, is a small, sharp document of what these sessions actually sounded like.
"Submerged In Sound," the title track of the group's original album and one of four cuts collected here, is closer to house than to the queasy, half-speed groove most people mean when they say new beat: rolling low end, a vocal that sounds thrown away rather than performed, a mix built for a system rather than a radio. "Stress Free" and "Astrogod" pull toward acid's more corrosive frequencies, while "He Chilled Out," presented in a 1992 remix, shows how quickly the project's own sound had already begun mutating away from new beat's founding tempo.
What Selected Works makes plain is how porous the roles were in this scene — DJ, broadcaster, shopkeeper and producer collapsing into the same handful of names within a few years. Frank De Wulf, credited here as one of several hands on the desk, was simultaneously building his own reputation as one of Belgian techno's more significant early producers; USA Import Records itself existed because a record shop realised it could press the music it was already selling.
Liaisons D never became a brand the way some of their Antwerp peers did. That was arguably never the point. Selected Works reads less like a lost classic being rescued and more like a transcript: proof that the city's new beat moment was, at ground level, a handful of people with turntables and a record shop, working out what they'd heard on the radio.
