And who is Hessel Veldman? The magnificently thriving reissue business reveals more and more parallel universes as it becomes more and more differentiated. Far away from the usual range of sound carriers, these direct our attention to things that were not necessarily overlooked at the time, but rather were simply invisible to the majority of mankind. You don’t have to go to the far corners of the globe to do this; it could even be the neighbouring Netherlands. The city of IJmuiden, for example, produced the musician Hessel Veldman, who was active in the home-taping network of the eighties, and those who did not belong to it at the time simply did not listen to his do-it-yourself recordings. From his extensive home studio work, »Eigen Boezem« (in English: »one’s own bosom«) now collects a few tracks under his civil name, the vast majority of which come from Y Create, a project by Veldman, to which, depending on the session, various guests joined in. Besides Veldman’s wife Nicole, the Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder was among those guests. What makes Hessel Veldman’s music so special is an intensification of the pop principle, according to which artists are not appreciated for what they can do, but for what they are. It is, then, a less original than idiosyncratic form of synthesizer-heavy post-punk or minimal wave-pop, which he explores in stoic repetitiveness: unaggressive, unpolished grooves, always with sufficiently oblique details, which are savored until he turns the tape off.
Eigen Boezem
