Furthering their incredible excavations of the shadowy corners of underground music, the fledgling London based imprint, Infinite Expanse, returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of Portable Vaudeville’s Holland Festival, the soundtrack for Fluxus icon Willem de Ridder’s “The Theatre for Moveable People, Objects and Music”, originally issued on cassette by the legendary Exart in 1983. An experimental, hypnotic ambient masterstroke guided by flowing synths and pulsing rhythms; it’s an absolute revelation that represents yet another towering high within the label’s already amazing body of work.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve had our eye on the small, London-based imprint Infinite Expanse. Founded in 2020 and guided by a deft ear for excavating the lesser-known histories of underground music, they’ve steadily brought forth a catalog of reissues that’s borne one revelation after another, keeping us waiting on bated breath for what comes next. Early on, Infinite Expanse kept things humble and simple, producing fairly limited run cassette editions (similar to much of the material from the 80s and 90s that they release), but more recently, beginning with their stellar reissue of Michael Atherton’s “Windshift” and carrying on to their stellar reissue of Richter Band’s “Smetana” at the end of last year, they’ve been moving into more ambitious waters, delivering beautifully produced vinyl LPs.

Hessel Veldman, who remains an active and vital force to this day, was a key figure in the Dutch home-taping / bedroom music / DIY movement, and an important member of the broader international network encompassing underground cassette releases during the late '70s and '80s. Somewhat legendary for his work under the moniker Y CREATE, issued in tiny editions by Exart, the label that he ran with his wife Nicole, Veldman combined the DIY ethos and raw irreverence and playfulness of punk, with spirited experimentalism, producing music within various projects that has left echoes in the landscape of underground music since they first appeared on the scene. One such case was the short lived project Portable Vaudeville: a duo featuring Veldman and Kees van Ede, that issued a single cassette, “Holland Festival”, in 1983.

While Veldman and van Ede’s collaborations remain fairly unobtainable, the two seem to have had a slightly more meaningful relationship than the single series of performances that offered the material for “Holland Festival”. The pair also issued a cassette, “Van Ede's Glaswerk”, during the same year, and, at least occasionally, came together within Y CREATE. All that said, the stunning achievement that is “Holland Festival” can only leave you wishing that they had worked together and recorded even more.

“Holland Festival” draws on material recorded across four consecutive nights where Portable Vaudeville contributed to the Dutch anarchist, artist, Fluxus member Willem de Ridder’s art-works / performances within the Holland Festival, an annual event dedicated to theatre, dance, music, and multidisciplinary art forms. de Ridder’s contribution to the festival in 1983 blended city walks, everyday movable objects, suspense, fear therapy, storytelling, and absurd performance art - collaboratively created with the audience - that subsequently sparked controversy and debate, being described by the press as a “disgusting display”. While it’s hard to have a full sense of the events that were met with these descriptions, they certainly aren’t merited by the music made by Portable Vaudeville. That said, the fact that they were made for a radical series of Fluxus associated performances is important for framing the context of these sounds.

“Holland Festival” is not a document per se. The material that became the album’s two sides was culled from recordings made over the four consecutive nights by Portable Vaudeville, during the actions staged by Willem de Ridder, before being subsequently edited into a concise form by Veldman and van Ede, at the Exart studio. Riding a wave of Veldman and van Ede’s striking synergy, the “soundtrack” unfurls within a singular realm that echoes of Berlin school electronics and certain threads of ambient music, fed through a radical approach to experimentalism. The outcome is a body of hypnotic soundscapes, off kilter ambience, driving rhythms, cycling patterns, free flowing melodies, collaged recordings of everyday sounds, and chaotic machine harmonies, created using a range of layered synths, and resulting in a hallucinatory listening experience that lasts the better part of an hour.

Buzzing with energy and permeated with a palpable sense of moody darkness, Portable Vaudeville’s “Holland Festival” feels decidedly of its moment, while possessing temperaments and approaches that place it far ahead of its time.