A scientific analysis of a gold ingot found beneath a Mexico City street almost 40 years ago has confirmed that it was part of the Spanish plunder with which conquistadores led by Hernán Cortés attempted to escape the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1520.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a statement that a fluorescent X-ray chemical analysis had determined that the ingot was cast between 1519 and 1520. The timeframe corresponds to a period in which Cortés ordered gold stolen from the Aztecs to be melted into bars so that they could be transported more easily to Spain.
That information, coupled with the fact that the gold bar was found along a route used by the conquistadores to flee Tenochtitlán after a battle on June 30, 1520 that cost the lives of many Spaniards, led archaeologists to conclude that it was part of the Spanish booty.
The announcement from INAH comes six months before the 500th anniversary of La Noche Triste (The Night of Sorrows) as the Aztec revolt that drove the Spaniards out of the city came to be known.
The day before the battle in which many of the Spaniards’ indigenous allies also lost their lives, the Aztec, or Mexica, emperor Moctezuma II was killed, triggering the uprising.
The ingot – which weights 1.93 kilograms and is 1.4 cm thick, 26.2 cm long and 5.4 cm wide – was found 4.8 meters underground on March 13, 1981 during a government construction project on Hidalgo Avenue, located adjacent to the Alameda Central park in downtown Mexico City.
The bar is believed to have fallen or been thrown into a canal as the Spanish fled on horseback along a causeway leading out of Tenochtitlán, which was built on an island in Lake Texcoco.
INAH archaeologist Leonardo López Luján said the ingot is a “key piece” in the “puzzle” of the events of June 30, 1520. He noted that its length is exactly the same as ingots described by conquistador and chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo.
López also said that the Florentine Codex, an encyclopedic work about the people and culture of pre-Hispanic central Mexico, says that the Mexicas searched the canals after the battle of La Noche Triste to look for plundered objects. One illustration shows a man with a gold bar in his left hand, he added.
The gold ingot, which is on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, is a “material witness” of the Spanish conquest and a “unique archaeological” relic of the Night of Sorrows, the archaeologist said.
Ernestina Godoy will head the independent prosecutor's office.
Mexico City Attorney General Ernestina Godoy will continue to head up the justice system as the city switches over to the new fiscalía general (FGJ), which began operations on Friday.
Godoy, who will hold the office for four years, said the new public prosecutor’s office will transform the way the city seeks justice and “will put reparation of damages first.”
“It’s an autonomous institution of the state that belongs to all of us. [The former Attorney General’s Office] that was left behind was anchored to old practices and stuck in the past,” she said at an inaugural ceremony outside Mexico City’s Interactive Museum of Economy.
“The creation of the FGJ represents a unique opportunity to build a true institution at the service of justice, which acts with the perspective of gender and investigates with professionalism and scientific rigor.”
She emphasized that violence against women will continue to be a priority for the new office and that her decisions as public prosecutor will not be subject to political calculations or media judgments.
Among her objectives are attending to complaints within 15 minutes, improving digital reporting of crimes, creating a DNA database and forming a group of professionals to work alongside the prosecutor’s office, investigative police and experts, among other goals.
She will also hire more forensic experts and increase training for her office’s agents and the investigative police, as well as create a system that allows victims of home burglaries to make reports from their homes, attended by officers.
Godoy said her goal is to create a climate in which citizens are more likely to report crimes, saying it was the best tool for combating impunity, adding that the new office will get rid of the disincentives people have for not reporting.
“The challenge ahead of us is enormous and demands an unbreakable commitment to justice and honesty of all who work here,” she said.
“For the majority of people, going to the public prosecutor’s office is a problem, not the solution,” she said after listing off over a dozen reasons people are afraid to report crimes.
Among them: opacity, corruption, inefficiency, poor treatment, enormous wait times, negligence, leaks, fabricated guilty verdicts, revictimization, omissions, deficient investigations, torture practices, complicity with crime, lack of personnel, technological delays, violations of due process, nepotism and clandestine prisons.
She also promised to execute all the arrest warrants in her office that have gone unresolved for years.
Creation of the fiscalía general is part of a process that began several years ago to strengthen the justice system with a public prosecutor’s office that was autonomous and independent of the executive branch of the government.
The federal Attorney General’s Office became the Fiscalía General de la República last year but criticism followed the appointment of someone close to President López Obrador to be the chief prosecutor. Naming Alejandro Gertz Manero to the position would affect its impartiality, critics said.
Critics spoke again following Godoys’ appointment as Mexico City’s chief prosecutor in December, citing her role as an activist in a political party. She is a former federal deputy and one of the founders of the ruling Morena party.
Gertz and Godoy have each been described by critics as a fiscal carnal, meaning they are government-friendly.
Grief after the school shooting in Torreón, Coahuila.
Parents of students at the Coahuila school where an 11-year-old carried out a deadly shooting on Friday morning had rejected the state’s backpack inspection program in October.
A document released after the shooting reveals that superintendent María Mayela Escobedo Carrillo notified state education authorities of the parents’ refusal to participate in the program.
“Parents were urged to agree to the Healthy and Safe Backpack Operation, which they rejected,” said the document.
“They expressed their refusal to participate in the searches and opposed others checking their children’s backpacks, also arguing that it was not necessary, since they themselves do so.”
In light of the attack, Coahuila Governor Miguel Ángel Riquelme said the operation would be reinforced and made mandatory in all schools in the state.
“[The operation] will be obligatory, in fact it was already being carried out in private [schools], but in some campuses where teachers and parents did not approve they rejected it in written declarations,” he said.
As to the source of the weapons used in the attack, Riquelme said the boy’s grandfather is being investigated.
“[The grandfather] is an essential part of the origin of the weapons. The grandfather is probably the owner of the guns,” he said.
Although he had initially said he believed the shooter had wanted to recreate a favorite videogame by carrying out the attack, Riqelme later said he only meant the game’s influence was part of the investigation.
The videogame theory was rejected by the Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico (REDIM), which attributed the attack to the “climate of war” in the country.
REDIM director Juan Martín Pérez said the attack wasn’t “a magical event,” nor was it influenced by a videogame, but was a product of the violence that has racked the country since former president Felipe Calderón declared war against drug traffickers in 2006.
“In this culture of war and militarization that we have in the country, this little 11-year-old socially and culturally reproduced this dynamic of armed violence, and the message in his environment clearly was that things are resolved through force,” said Pérez.
He said that as in all countries at war there are weapons, for which he called for the government to continue working with the United States to inhibit arms trafficking.
“The fact that the little one had access to weapons . . . speaks to the impressive quantity of small guns in circulation, which we can speak of in the millions, since families want to protect themselves and arm themselves illegally because they are in an environment of organized crime,” he said.
He also called on the Public Education Secretariat (SEP) to work to prevent such cases, as there are warning signs that can alert authorities to attacks like this before they happen.
The international nonprofit Save the Children also called on the SEP to improve security conditions in schools, attend to students’ mental health and carry out active shooter simulations to prepare them for possible attacks.
It said that the generalized violence in Mexico has severely affected the mental health of children and young people, as even the places where they should feel the safest, such as their homes and schools, have become dangerous.
A Save the Children survey of over 3,000 children and youths found that 37% had witnessed a shooting. It said that such an environment causes anxiety, constant fear, post-traumatic stress disorder and lowered academic performance, among other afflictions.
The organization asked president López Obrador to make strategies to prevent violence against minors a national priority.
Lynching victim in Chiapas after his arrest by police.
A man suspected of raping and killing a six-year-old girl in Chiapas was beaten and burned alive by angry residents on Friday morning.
Residents of the community of Faja de Oro accused Alfredo Roblero, 37, of raping and decapitating Jarid N., who had been reported as missing on Thursday night.
Although police from the neighboring city of Tapachula had come to arrest Roblero, a mob of angry citizens surrounded their patrol vehicle and pulled him out. They took him to a community park, tied him to a pole and beat him before dousing him in gasoline and burning him alive.
The Tapachula police officers reportedly did nothing to stop the crowd from killing Roblero.
State police officers later arrived on the scene with forensics experts from the Chiapas Attorney General’s Office (FGE) to investigate.
The FGE said it would “not allow the public to carry out justice by its own hand.”
One needn’t look much farther than social media (or some of the comments on Mexico News Daily) to be aware that the presumption of innocence is a foreign concept for many.
Now there are elements within the federal government that don’t respect that presumption either, according to Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero.
The attorney general’s claim came in response to a question asked at a gathering of diplomats in Mexico City.
“The Attorney General’s Office as an autonomous entity has been very respectful of the presumption of innocence . . . [but] there are elements, not in the Attorney General’s Office, but in the government that don’t respect that presumption,” he responded.
“. . . We have it very clear, we don’t make . . . assertions that go against the presumption of innocence,” Gertz Manero said, adding that statements of such a nature are not legitimate and create a “serious crisis” in the process of prosecuting a suspected criminal.
The attorney general declined to name the “elements” to which he was referring but added that “we all know” who they are.
One of the people Gertz Manero is believed to have been referring to is Santiago Nieto, head of the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF).
Nieto, who was fired from his role as the top electoral crimes prosecutor in the previous government, has taken on a leading role in the fight against corruption initiated by the current administration and spoken out about several investigations conducted by the UIF.
He has revealed at press conferences that the UIF has frozen or requested the freezing of bank accounts held by high-profile figures including former cabinet secretary Rosario Robles, ex-Pemex chief Emilio Lozoya and former Pemex workers’ union leader Carlos Romero Deschamps.
Constitutional lawyer Alberto Woolrich told the newspaper Milenio that the freezing of accounts in itself is not a violation of the presumption of innocence because the UIF has a legal right to freeze accounts until it can verify the origin of funds they hold.
“It’s a means created . . . to avoid [money] laundering so there is not a lack of respect for the presumption of innocence,” he said.
In turn, a criminal lawyer who requested anonymity expressed skepticism that merely speaking out about a current investigation amounted to disrespecting a person’s right to the presumption of innocence.
“. . . It’s one thing to say that we’re investigating to find out if a crime was committed and another thing to say that [a person] committed a crime,” the lawyer told Milenio.
However, the lawyer conceded that statements made about investigations could act as a hindrance to probes being conducted by the FGR.
In contrast to those views, National Action Party Senator Xóchitl Gálvez charged that the government is using the UIF to carry out a campaign of “fiscal terrorism.”
“. . . I think that it should be more discreet,” she said.
The Democratic Revolution Party expressed a similar sentiment, asserting in a statement that President López Obrador uses the UIF to carry out revenge attacks on his political enemies.
Responding to Gertz Manero’s insinuations, López Obrador defended Nieto at his morning press conference on Thursday.
“Santiago doesn’t do anything without consulting with the president, you can’t blame him. Speaking frankly, imagine if I, here, devoted myself to reporting about money laundering, it’s not my job, another public servant has to do it as long as it doesn’t affect due process. We’re obliged to act with adherence to the law, it’s a matter of coming to an agreement [with the FGR],” he said.
Yet according to the operating guidelines established by the international network of UIFs, they should operate autonomously and independently, which would likely rule out consultations with the president.
Meanwhile, López Obrador himself has come very close to disrespecting the presumption of innocence if he hasn’t actually crossed the line.
At a press conference on January 2, López Obrador questioned where García Luna’s wealth could have come from if he didn’t accept bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel as the United States government alleges.
“Where did [his] houses and apartments come from,” he asked.
López Obrador has also insinuated that former president Felipe Calderón was complicit with organized crime although he has ruled out an investigation in relation to the charges against his security secretary “because it would create the perception that we’re doing it for political purposes.”
The Astoria departed Thursday on its maiden cruise.
The first cruise ship to do an exclusive tour of the Sea of Cortés set sail from Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, on Thursday with 500 passengers aboard for its 11-day Treasures of the Sea of Cortés voyage.
UK-based Cruise and Maritime Voyages announced in September that its boutique cruise liner Astoria would be offering the cruises in December, but its first cruise was delayed until the new year.
The ship will visit the ports of Topolobampo, Mazatlán, Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Loreto, Santa Rosalía and Guaymas before returning to Puerto Peñasco.
The cruise was inaugurated with the blessing of Sonora Governor Claudia Pavlovich, Puerto Peñasco Mayor Ernesto Munro and Cruise and Maritime Voyages vice president John Dennis as a 200-person crew awaited the ship’s first passengers.
Pavlovich was pleased to welcome a new era of tourism in her state, as the passengers include people from England, Australia, the United States and Mexico.
“We’re putting Puerto Peñasco [also known as Rocky Point] on the international level,” she said, adding that the cruise is expected to bring in 190 million pesos (US $10.1 million) of revenue to her state alone.
The total revenue boost for all of the ports the ship will visit is expected to be around 380 million pesos (US $20.2 million).
Aside from the tour that left on Thursday, Cruise and Maritime Voyages has two others scheduled for this month, one that leaves on the 20th and another on the 31st. The first two have already sold out and the third is almost full.
The US $1,500 price tag includes all meals, afternoon tea and late-night snacks, cocktail parties, entertainment, activities, port taxes and more.
The Astoria is smaller than other cruise liners, allowing it to maneuver into ports that larger ships can’t enter. Its eight passenger decks and 277 cabins allow for 500 passengers, and it also boasts a spa, beauty salon, casino, gym, sauna, steam room, show lounge and nightclub.
Currently the world’s oldest cruise ship still sailing, it was built in 1944 and made its maiden voyage in 1948.
Originally called the Stockholm, the Astoria famously collided with the Andrea Doria transatlantic ocean liner in 1956. Although the Stockholm survived the collision, the Andrea Doria did not, and 46 people died when it sank.
The ship’s storied history also includes a pirate attack in the Gulf of Aden in 2008 and its use as a pleasure cruise liner for leaders of East Germany’s communist government during the Cold War.
The school where a student killed a teacher and wounded six other people.
An 11-year-old boy shot and killed his teacher and wounded six others before turning his guns on himself at a primary school in Torreón, Coahuila, Friday morning.
The shooting occurred at the Colegio Cervantes private school around 8:00am after the student asked his teacher for permission to go to the bathroom. Identified as María Asafat Medina, the teacher went to look for him when he hadn’t returned after 15 minutes.
When she found him, authorities said, the student was holding two guns. He then shot her and went on to shoot another teacher and five students before shooting and killing himself.
Secretariat of Public Security coordinator Adelaido Flores said two of the injured minors are in serious condition.
Coahuila Governor Miguel Ángel Riquelme said the student had apparently told his classmates “Today is the day” when they arrived at school.
Riquelme also blamed a videogame called Natural Selection for influencing the boy to carry out the attack.
“It appears that the boy [was] influenced by a videogame called Natural Selection, he even wore a shirt with the name of the game at the bottom . . . I believe he tried to recreate [the videogame] today,” said Riquelme.
He also said that a security program to check backpacks would be reinforced and become mandatory in Coahuila schools. Administrators at Colegio Cervantes rejected the program in October after parents had petitioned for it not to be implemented.
President López Obrador expressed his condolences for the families of the children and teachers involved in the “terrible, very terrible tragedy.”
He regretted that such an act would happen in Mexico and called on parents to be more attentive to their children and to continue working “for the strengthening of moral and spiritual values.”
“We have to pay attention to the children, to the young people, not turn our backs on them. We need lots of attention in our families with children . . . so these things don’t happen,” he said.
Coahuila Attorney General Maurilio Ochoa said the boy hadn’t shown signs typical of school shooters before the attack.
“They tell me that he had good grades, that he was even going to go to an academic event. He was a stand-out student. He didn’t show signs of depression or suffer from bullying,” Ochoa said.
Politicians also offered their condolences, while some, such as Democratic Revolution Party Senator Miguel Ángel Mancera, called for stricter gun regulations.
“It is essential to ‘de-pistolize Mexico’ through initiatives we continue to promote in the [Senate], we must restrict as much as possible the possibility of possessing or carrying illegal firearms. Our full solidarity with the citizens of Torreón,” he said in a Tweet.
Federal Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo offered the full support of his cabinet in the investigation into the shooting, and the United Nations called for the culture of violence in Mexico to come to an end.
Teachers' tents are back in the Oaxaca city zócalo.
After a long silence, members of the CNTE teachers’ union in Oaxaca are on the march once again.
The militant union has begun protests and blockades to demand the recognition of indigenous education and guaranteed teaching positions for graduates of teacher training schools.
The protests began on Tuesday when the CNTE called a strike and set up tents in the Oaxaca city zócalo.
On Thursday, they used hijacked public buses and delivery trucks to block the entrance to the Oaxaca International Airport, forcing passengers to walk 1.4 kilometers to get to and from the terminal.
Blockades also affected traffic headed south to the coastal destinations of Puerto Escondido and Huatulco.
Teachers also occupied the San Pablo Huitzo toll booth — a favorite target of protesting teachers for many years — on the highway to Mexico City, where they raised the barrier and collected “voluntary donations” from motorists in order to be allowed to pass.
Although representatives of the state Public Education Institute and the federal Secretariat of Public Education met with the teachers, they refused to call off the strike. They also occupied government offices and closed the state Congress.
They have threatened to take their protest to the National Palace in Mexico City if their demands are not met.
A spectacular eruption at the Popocatépetl volcano early Thursday sent a three-kilometer column of smoke and ash into the sky and launched incandescent rocks a kilometer down its slopes.
El Popo, as the volcano straddling the states of México, Puebla and Morelos is commonly known, erupted at 6:31am, according to the national Civil Protection service. Ash fell in towns in several municipalities in the vicinity of the 5,426-meter-high conical volcano.
Civil Protection chief Luis Felipe Puente said the eruption at Popocatépetl was within the range of what is considered normal and therefore the alert level would be maintained at yellow Phase 2.
The warning recognizes that there is increased activity at the volcano but is only the fourth highest of seven alert levels in a three-tier “traffic light” system. A 12-kilometer security radius remains in place around the base of El Popo.
Puente said that wind took ash in a north-northeasterly direction after the early morning eruption.
The Morelos government said that its monitoring systems detected 268 exhalations of water vapor, gases and ash after the large eruption, which was even detected by satellites in space. It also said that a 1.4-magnitude volcano tectonic earthquake occurred at 10:04am.
Puebla Civil Protection authorities said the municipalities of San Nicolás de los Ranchos, Chiautzingo, San Matías Tlalancaleca and Teotlalcingo all received a light dusting of ash.
Authorities recommend the use of face masks by people who live near the volcano because fine ash articles can remain suspended in the atmosphere f0r weeks.
Thursday’s volcanic activity follows a particularly active 2019 for Popocatépetl, with numerous eruptions including one in June that emitted a plume of ash that rose between four and five kilometers above its crater
December 21 marked the 25th anniversary of renewed activity at the volcano located about 90 kilometers southeast of Mexico City. On that day in 1994, El Popo erupted for the first time in 56 years.
Belgian-born electronic music pioneer Joel Vandroogenbroeck died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 23 in the state of Jalisco where he had been living for the last 30 years.
Although the 81-year-old composer and musician had survived heart attacks and broken bones, it was septic shock that ended his unusual and colorful life.
As his neighbor and friend, I can attest that right up to the very end, Joel retained a childlike sense of humor and wonder that everyone found irresistible. His very last words to me came over the telephone:
“John, I found some very interesting information supporting the idea that world is really flat — we have to get together and talk about this.”
That was Joel — and when I went to the funeral home to gaze upon the white, plastic-looking face that the mortician was passing off as “him,” I fully expected to see one of those pasty eyes pop open and wink at me — that would have been a true Joel-style final farewell.
Joel VDB gives a concert in the woods in the mile-high community where he lived in Jalisco.
Joel always claimed he came to Mexico “by accident.” The roots of this accident are in a composition of his called Animal Farm, which won first prize in the Synthesizer Tape Contest held annually by the Japanese company Roland, which had produced the world’s first electronic piano. This resulted in his being invited to San Francisco in 1984 for three months by the Djerassi Foundation, along with other Swiss artists.
“I loved San Francisco,” Joel told me, “and I wanted to stay for an extra month, but the dollar was so high (in relation to the Swiss franc) at that time that we had no choice but to go back home. But then somebody told us, ‘Why don’t you go to Mexico? There was a devaluation yesterday: more than 60%!’ So we took the train to Los Mochis and stopped in Creel where I experienced a real case of culture shock. I saw pistoleros and Indians and felt like I had gone 200 years into the past.
“Eventually we reached Guadalajara where I made friends and spent a month in Ajijic, which I found fascinating. I was so impressed that I came back again year after year and then one February I returned to Switzerland and found temperatures of 10 below zero and a meter of snow. Somewhere under that snow was my little white car, but it took me two days to find it. And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I said, ‘No more winter!’ I sold everything, gave away or burned the rest and came to live here. And I like it ─ there’s something magic about Mexico.”
Joel Vandroogenbroeck was born in Brussels, Belgium, where he started his musical career at the age of 3. “There was a piano in the house,” he says, “so I just started to play it.” Following in Mozart’s footsteps, he gave his first concert when he was 5 years old to a plaza full of American soldiers who had come to liberate Belgium in 1944.
Eventually a friend introduced him to “a new kind of music played by people like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.” Joel then began to play jazz, forgot about school and regularly slipped out the window at night to frequent jazz clubs, which resulted in his receiving the Art Tatum prize as “youngest jazz pianist” at the tender age of 15.
When he reached 17, he announced to his parents: “Goodbye folks, I’m off to Africa.” He had been accepted as bass player in a jazz group invited to play in what was then the Belgian Congo. The impressions he received while in the Congo later resulted in the track Black Sand on the first Brainticket LP.
Bedridden, Joel VDB kept on going: “On my iPad I can do everything I used to do on a synthesizer.”
In time Joel broadened his musical horizons as he discovered African and Indian music as well as the 60s sounds of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. This resulted in the album Brainticket, one of the first to use electronic effects. “That was before the synthesizer,” Joel explained to me, “and we actually used an untuned short wave radio to produce a lot of the surrealistic sounds in the album.”
Amazingly, in between his concerts of psychedelic music, Joel VDB, as many called him, managed to find time to do in-depth research in Bali on their traditional Gamelan music. “The music that they play is very important for their religion,” he told me. “They have to make music morning, noon and night; there’s no way out! So they shut off the radio and start to play. By the way, out of Bali came what we call minimalist music today, the kind of music played by Philip Glass and Steve Reich.”
In Bali, Joel learned both to play and to manufacture the local instruments and eventually started a Joged Bumbung Band. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” he said,“but it was a big success. We even did concerts throughout Europe, accompanying these Balinese instruments with gongs, strings, flutes and other classical instruments, which made a very good combination.”
Back in Mexico many years later, in 1995, the Jalisco Philharmonic presented one of the most unusual ─ and most successful ─ concerts in its history.
On two occasions Guadalajara’s Degollado theater was filled to overflowing by enthusiastic audiences who had come to hear a harmonious blending of jazz, rock, synthesizer and classical instruments all presented under the encompassing title of “Obras [works] de Joel Vandroogenbroeck,” a composer, the Philharmonic announced, who was quietly writing music on three Atari computers in his little cabin lost in the pine-covered hills west of Guadalajara.
Eventually entrepreneurs in the U.S.A. discovered the whereabouts of the legendary Joel Vandroogenbroeck and told him that his music of the 1970s was not only well remembered, but still so popular that they wanted to re-release as many as possible of his past records.
[soliloquy id="98076"]
“I discovered there were about 100 bootlegs of Brainticket out there,” the composer told me with a laugh, “and one of the albums included in this new release by Cleopatra Records, called Live in Rome, is a recording I never even knew existed!”
Cleopatra eventually organized The Space Rock Invasion USA Tour in 2011 and Joel plus a revitalized Brainticket band toured the country from New York to California. Afterwards, he told electronic music aficionado Jerry Kranitz, “This has been fantastic for me . . . I met some people on this tour who knew Brainticket, and they came with the original albums and wanted me to sign them. One even had a tattoo: a Brainticket tattoo! I’m really amazed at the response to all this.”
Now that he is gone, more anecdotes are popping up about Joel Vandroogenbroeck: he was, they say, a close friend of professor Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. For a while he lived in the same house as Hermann Hesse. He wrote music for H.R. Giger, the painter who created the extraordinary images of the film Alien.
He once had a morning cappuccino with the legendary Federico Fellini at his favorite bar at Piazza del Popolo. He recorded for Maestro Ennio Morricone. He used to play music with Mussolini’s son, a talented pianist. His first wife was a beautiful fashion model, the darling of the European royal families. His first album was banned in most countries because “listening to it might destroy your brain.”
His very last recording was Sunset (2013) with William Shatner. Does all of this sound like a blurb for a TV series? Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
No doubt many more stories will come to light, but most important of all is the fact that Joel Vandroogenbroeck’s music truly touched the lives of many people. Electronic music historian Dave Thompson says he purchased a Brainticket album as a schoolboy for pennies (at a junk shop) and discovered what he calls a whole new world: “I entered the world of Joel Vandroogenbroeck. And I can safely say that I have never been any place quite like it since then.”
