Five Years 1985-1990 Exhibitions Concerts Performances Installations Lectures Publications Het Apollohuis 148-page A4 book documenting 102 exhibitions and 163 concerts. In a former nineteenth-century cigar factory in Eindhoven, something remarkable happened between 1985 and 1990. Het Apollohuis became one of Europe's most vital platforms for experimental music, sound art, and performance - a place where boundaries between disciplines dissolved and artists from across the world gathered to present work that often had nowhere else to go.

This wasn't a museum or a traditional gallery. It was an independent space operating outside institutional structures, able to take risks and follow intuitions. Over those five years, approximately 400 artists passed through - Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Terry Fox, Alvin Curran, Jerry Hunt, Christina Kubisch, Ellen Fullman, Hugh Davies, Pascal Comelade, Jan Boerman and countless others whose work was reshaping what music and sound art could be.

The programme was restless, ambitious. 102 exhibitions and installations. 163 concerts and performances. Het Apollohuis didn't just present work - it documented it, published it, extended its reach through artist books, multiples, audio cassettes, LPs, and CDs. The space understood that experimental work needs more than a single performance or exhibition. It needs context, documentation, circulation. Five Years 1985-1990 captures this period in a 148-page A4 book filled with photographs and information on every exhibition, concert, performance, installation, and lecture that took place during those remarkable years. It's both archive and argument - evidence of what's possible when a space commits fully to supporting work at the edges of contemporary practice.

This was the era when experimental music and sound art were finding new forms, new technologies, new ways of existing in space. Het Apollohuis was there, providing a platform when artists like Lucier were exploring acoustic phenomena, when Radigue was developing her distinctive approach to electronic drones, when Fox was bridging sculpture and sound, when Hunt was creating his overwhelming electronic environments. The space didn't dictate aesthetics - it created conditions for discovery.

For anyone interested in the history of experimental music and sound art in the 1980s, this book is essential. Not as nostalgia, but as documentation of a moment when possibilities were opening up, when artists were finding each other, when spaces like Het Apollohuis proved that independent platforms could operate at the highest level of ambition and seriousness.