Baba Pen & The Bim Bam Band will release its self-titled debut album on 10 October on Minstrel Music label. Baba’s childhood home was converted into a studio and there the record was played in by his group of friends consisting of members of Money & The Man, The Grand East, Temple Fang and Tricklebolt. Recording and mixing were done by Jim Zwinselman (Jimmy Diamond) and the album was mastered by Wessel Oltheten.
Baba Pen, real name Bastian Pen, is The Netherland’s new psych-rock guru. After ten years of rocking with the band Tricklebolt, it was time for something new. Baba Pen’s predilection for the 60s comes to the surface; on the one hand the real songs songs but also precisely the psychedelic and the abandonment of logical structures. A cosmic country song can be succeeded by something psychedelic, and yet it feels very logical and natural. Production-wise it has been pulled much more towards the now, with synths and light guitars keeping it all super fresh. Inspirations therefore run right through all the decades, from The Doors, XTC, The Cardigans, World Party to the now: Jacco Gardner, Tame Impala and Jonathan Wilson.
Lyrically the album is written around a life-changing experience of Pen: in high school, a classmate once told him about a loner/hermit who lived a few villages away in some kind of hut in the woods. A strange figure, he would have studied himself to death. He now lived there in a sort of hut, big beard strange clothes etc. He sat in the bathtub beating his drums at night, had an invisible dog and was building a bunker with incredible concrete for some kind of third world drama. Many years later but still very intrigued by the story, Baba decided to call up the friend of the time… He told him that the hermit had since died, but that his hut might still be there. This indeed turned out to be the case, the door was even open… Inside Baba found a big mess with mountains of clothes, books, spiritual magazines and statues but what caught his eye then led to this debut album: a bookcase full of one and the same book “Inner Alchemy and the Road to Immortality”. The unpublished book turned out to be written by the man himself and blew Pen away. “For six months I could think of almost nothing else, I found it so intensely fascinating and even almost signed up to study Western esotericism. I also started to get a bit freaky about it because I felt he was present at times. Had he really transcended his body? Should I not have entered his hut? Was he crazy or genius? Am I going crazy too now? During that period, I wrote a lot of lyrics for the album with a kind of double perspective, is this about him or about me?”