Rindert Lammers is an ambient jazz artist & multi-instrumentalist based in Nijmegen, Netherlands. His debut record, Thank You Kirin Kiki, is out April 18, 2025 on Western Vinyl.
Years ago, when I moved from one student room to another, the only thing I was concerned about was my vinyl collection. Heavy as those boxes are, I’d rather haul them myself than risk disaster. But disaster struck anyway. After lugging boxes up and down three flights of stairs, I caved and handed one to my dad and brother. Then, as if scripted, it happened: Midway down the stairs, the box tipped, a few records slid forward, and it slipped from my brother’s hands. My heart stopped. I immediately checked the damage: a small tear in the sleeve of my brand-new 2007 reissue of Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. OK, I told myself, Don’t overreact. I still had the original English and Dutch pressings from the 1975 release year. But still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day.
I must have been 12 or 13 when a tech-savvy friend of my dad gave me a burned DVD containing Genesis’s entire discography for my birthday. Despite my early interest in music, I distinctly remember feeling a little disappointed. It wasn’t even wrapped in paper, and it didn’t feel like much of a gift at the time. A few weeks later, I was home sick on the couch with a glass of apple juice in hand and popped the DVD into the player. It started with their more recent albums, and Phil Collins’s voice was instantly familiar as my dad had spent countless car rides playing “Another Day in Paradise” on repeat. But what was new to were the thunderous drum fills, the epic, narrative-driven songs, and above all, the dramatic, almost classical keyboard parts.
A magical world opened up to me. While it’s certainly unusual to begin your personal musical journey with Genesis’s complex prog rock of the early 1970s, in hindsight, I can pinpoint why this music resonated so deeply with me. As a part-time history teacher, I now understand how fascinated most students of that age are by the mythical worlds of the Greeks, Romans, and the Middle Ages. Genesis’s early music sounded exactly like that — a fairytale world with layers of 12-string acoustic guitars and lyrics about “Old King Cole” and “Six saintly shrouded men.”
As the son of a former Protestant pastor, I can also see now why an obsession with a band named after the first book of the Bible wasn’t entirely out of character. Genesis’s songs felt like Old Testament stories brought to life. Archangel Peter Gabriel sang of a “kingdom beyond the skies,” and that kind of lyric landed particularly well for a boy who actually believed in such a place.
And, to be honest, I was just a weird kid. Every single one of my school reports mentioned the same thing: “Rindert is a dreamer. He stares out the window with his mouth open and doesn’t pay attention to what’s being said.” I struggled to connect with my peers. I played football but only as a goalkeeper. I could make my classmates laugh, but I rarely hung out with anyone after school. Genesis — and prog rock in general — was music for the misfits. It was entirely mine.
But there was one exception during those days on the couch with my apple juice: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the bizarre four-sided prog rock musical from 1975, and also the last Genesis album to feature Peter Gabriel. It was unmistakably Genesis, but it felt unhinged — vivid and raw. At the time, it didn’t grab me, nor did it in the few years that followed. It wasn’t an instant success when it was released either. The audience struggled to make sense of the story, and even the band seemed unsure of what it was about. Phil Collins famously told a journalist, “Ask Peter — I’m just the drummer.”
In the rare comments Gabriel made about the album’s meaning, he mentioned that the spark for the narrative reportedly came from watching the acid western cult film El Topo in a New York arthouse cinema. The film, about a zen gunfighter encountering deformed creatures in an underground desert, shocked him with its explicit, wild imagery. A quick five-minute search on YouTube will show you that El Topo is, simply put, weird. But it’s a different kind of weird than Genesis’s usual 10-minute, 12-string hymn-like compositions.
Although The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway still confuses me in parts, its unparalleled world-building is what makes it my favorite album. Despite its fragmented narrative, it conjures a mysterious place I can still step into. All I have to do is open its thick, gatefold sleeves, and I’m there again.
That sense of world-building was a key inspiration for my own debut album, Thank You Kirin Kiki. While my soft, instrumental ambient-jazz approach was less grandiose and weirdly experimental than Genesis’s magnum opus, the ambition to craft an immersive, filmic experience came directly from albums like The Lamb.
The idea for the album started with a YouTube comment my brother shared. Beneath a video featuring the late Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura, someone wrote about living alone in a car for two years on the streets and in the parks of Tokyo. Listening to Yoshimura’s calm, meditative music had made that period the happiest time of their life.
This YouTube comment became a gateway for me into the cinematic world of Thank You Kirin Kiki. On the track “Sleep Well Hiroshi Yoshimura,” I included a spoken rendition of that comment. Across the instrumental album, I layered atmospheric details: the sound of Tokyo waking up in the opening track “Summer in Shibuya” (just as New York awakens in the title track of The Lamb), jingling car keys, snippets of phone conversations, and the call of an owl in the night. This way, the story of the person in the car, just like Rael in The Lamb, unfolds before you, without the meaning of each track being explicitly spelled out.
The pain my brother caused me by dropping my beloved reissue, was softened when Genesis announced a farewell tour in 2022. I never thought I’d see them live, but I went alone to Amsterdam, found the perfect seat, and with a beer in hand, I watched my favorite band. During an acoustic moment, a mysterious chord pulled me into their magical world once again. A minute later, 17,000 voices sang, “And the Lamb… Lies Down… On Brohoho-hoadway,” but in that moment, it felt entirely mine. 
