Organic Intelligence XX: Eindhoven - early 80s provincial/international music

In this month's antidote to the algorithm, Richard Foster takes us back to the early 1980s and a fertile Eindhoven post punk scene that ended up making waves on the far side of the Atlantic.

Photo of Plus Instruments courtesy of Roy Tee

Despite being traditionally Catholic and “an accidental compound of villages”, by 1980, Eindhoven, a city in the province of Brabant in the south Netherlands, became a petri dish for the wilder forms of post-punk. It was a young city with a large student population, home to the famous Design Academy (DAE). Thanks to electronics corporation Philips, Eindhoven was the base for a set of remarkable people active on the shifting interface between alternative music culture, the visual arts and technological research. We can name Lou Ottens, the developer of the cassette tape and the CD, celebrated avant-garde composers and polymaths like Paul Panhuysen, Remko Scha and Michel Waisvisz, enlightened cultural directors such as Hans Baaijens, filmmakers and artists like Dick Verdult, Maria van Heeswijk and René Daniëls, and open-minded musicians like Nasmak’s Joop van Brakel and Toon Bressers.