Grace J. at my exhibition ‘Duckface’, The Boiler Room, SF
Kroes announces ‘Kroes den Bock Records’:
Interview with Kroes den Bock here
Two reviews of ‘The Rascal from Alaska’:
Hypehubmagazine:
Martijn’s monologue conveys the absurd through the poetic and has perfected a deadpan delivery. Each line through these songs strikes you as a punchline baked into a story worth swallowing by flame and smoky campfire, or maybe in some dark, shadowy bar in the North where the chill bites just enough to make sure you’re paying attention. The Hugh is not just played for laughs but a sly reflection on the absurdities of existence, a reminder that even in the most brutal circumstances, there remains an opening for shenanigans and significance.
As the first single from the forthcoming concept album, “The Rascal from Alaska,”establishes an audible venture into frozen absurdity, where imagination depicts reality, and storytelling is the only fact. For lovers of sensual language and surprisingly silly poetic humor, Martijn Benders’ latest is a delight you won’t be able to stop reading or listening to a riotous, frigid frolic you’ll remember and adore.
Zillions magazine:
“The Rascal from Alaska” by Kroes den Bock is a mind-bending folk fable
Kroes den Bock bursts onto the music scene with something delightfully unexpected in his new single, “The Rascal from Alaska,” This catchy tune is already shaping up to be a quirky summer favorite.
The music introduces us to a memorable character, an Arctic antihero who navigates the snowy wilderness. He moonwalks a moose and spins tales from the frozen ground, mixing humor with creativity. This isn’t just a song, it’s a vivid story filled with enchanting imagery. The music itself has a simple, warm feel reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s later style. However, while Cash often told moral tales, Benders leans into playful mischief.
When the red-capped Fly Agaric of Volume I closed its spotted eyelids, a doorway was left ajar—just wide enough for a shaft of impossible colour to spill across the mind’s floor. That shaft now widens into a full, humming portal. Step through, dear reader, and you will find yourself in Love’s Secret Domain, the luminous province of LSD: a compound spun from rye-ergot dreams, carried on the breath of the 1960s, and still whispering its kaleidoscopic riddles today.
This book is not a chemistry lesson, nor a nostalgia trip, nor a manifesto. It is an invitation to listen. Lysergic acid diethylamide is a quiet oracle; it speaks in synaesthetic murmurs, rearranging the furniture of perception until the walls of ordinary reality turn liquid. To stand in its presence is to discover that your own thoughts can shimmer like stained glass—or fracture like a mirror dropped on a marble floor. In either case, nothing quite looks the same once the shards are gathered.
Across these pages you will meet physicists who heard equations singing, poets who caught stanzas blooming from the ceiling, therapists who watched trauma dissolve into music, and garden-variety wanderers who returned from a single afternoon forever changed. You will also read of hubris, missteps, and the long shadow cast by prohibition—a reminder that every light throws a darkness of equal depth.
But above all, Love’s Secret Domain is a celebration of the imaginative courage that LSD coaxes forth: the daring to question the given, to redraw the self, to greet each moment as a living artwork in progress. Rather than prescribing paths, the chapters ahead lay out a constellation of experiences—scientific, historical, personal—so you can chart your own course through the starlit unknown.
Whether you approach lysergic territory with pilgrim’s awe, sceptic’s eyebrows, or artist’s hunger, know this: the map you hold is alive. It will rearrange itself as you turn the page, mirroring the very substance it chronicles. In that spirit, read slowly. Pause often. Let your imagination expand into the blank spaces.
The first volume asked you to sit beneath a mushroom’s spotted canopy and listen for fairy tales. This second volume asks you to slip into a molecule’s crystalline heart and feel the universe breathe. Take a deep breath of your own, then: the portal is open. What you do with its light is, as ever, your secret—and your freedom.
—Martijn Benders
Available in shops and streaming channels soon! The renegade duo Benders & den Bock pitch their snow-stained tent at the crossroads of folk, outlaw country and outright mischief. Picture Kroes den Bock himself—silver hair tousled by a sub-arctic breeze, guitar carved from the jawbone of a mythic musk-ox—yodel-whispering confessions to a husky that refuses to fetch anything but philosophic insight. Meanwhile Martijn Benders, philosopher-poet stowed beneath a fur-lined parka and darker sunglasses than a midnight sun deserves, scribbles surreal verses on the back of a frozen parking ticket. That crackling you hear between tracks? Merely the glacier applauding.
Spin the dial and you’ll tumble through twelve tales taller than a lumberjack on stilts:
- “Incoming Wheels”—a banjo-propelled avalanche in which gravity gets a speeding ticket.
- “She Gave My Welding Machine to the Ukraine”—the only break-up song that doubles as a geopolitical donation receipt.
- “Hurting in Your Yurt”—because heartache echoes louder in felt.
- And let’s not forget “Daddy Was on Fentanyl,” proof that even dark medicine can be brewed into bright melody when poured through the right copper still.
By the time the title track snarls its final chord and the closer “Time’s Nicking Time” flicks the second hand off your wrist, you may wonder whether you’ve just attended a hootenanny, a séance, or a snowball fight waged with metaphors. The correct answer is “yes.”
So pour a dram, stoke the stove, and drop the needle. The Rascal from Alaska is about to sled straight through your living-room carpet—leaving behind only laughter, lingering wisdom, and a suspicious puddle where certainty used to stand. Strap in: sled-dogs bite, rascals harder, and this record hardest of all.
Also available soon: the German masterpiece ‘Bubbumsenmude’, the most literary Schlager record ever made: