DIER

Dier biography
DIER (Dutch for "Animal") was an experimental rock band from the town of Laren in the Netherlands. The band was founded by composer, bassist and vocalist Martin Hoogeboom, guitarist Peter Kok and drummer Paul van de Kruis, and was active throughout the 1980s, with most of their output being released by Hoogeboom's own independent record company STUM (Stichting Update Materials). The band's first album Fragment / Miltvuur, released in 1981, showed influence from the post-punk and no wave scenes and was a mixture of punk rock songs and short, haphazardly edited avant/noise-rock instrumentals in the style of The Work, Pere Ubu and This Heat, alongside a lengthy Zappa-esque sound collage.

After producing some more music in a similar but ever more adventurous style, the band went on hiatus in 1984 and resurfaced two years later with new guitarist Joris Goyarts to release two more EPs; these showcased a more polished sound and showed a further musical development towards more complex, unpredictable proto-math rock, somewhat similar to Ruins in terms of both its musical style and its amelodic, blurted-out vocals.

Paul van de Kruis left after the release of 1987's Hamer and was replaced by Chris Frankemölle. In 1989, after recruiting singer Paul Janszen from the Amsterdam-based post-punk band Coka, the band released one final album, Hardt, which was an attempt to amalgamate the band's punk roots with their new intricate, discordant avant-rock sound. Band leader Martin Hoogeboom is the only member of Dier known to have continued a career in professional music after the band's discontinuation in 1991, and still releases free improvisation recordings on Bandcamp to this day.