Waste of Time was an Amsterdam based Theatre collective of mime artists. They originated in 1974 and created about fifteen productions until 1985. Already in 1974 they used multimedia like music, visual arts and film to accompany the mime playing. Usually plays involved no speech, no story and no moral. Not coincidentally their work seemed to reflect on the powerlessness of communication and human loneliness. Waste of Time used to perform a lot in Belgian cities and small places because they prefered the light-spiritedness of the audience in contrast with the more elitist Amsterdam in-crowd theatre audience. The mime group can be viewed as an early example of innovative Dutch performance art.
The music on this private seven inch single is made by Mike Floothuis and Jaap Lindijer. Much to my surprise I came to the conclusion that these musicians were also part of one of the Netherlands' most obscure and mysterious bands called Danger. Danger released an album in 1973 which was comprised of two side-long tracks of improvisation music (a record very high on my wantlist). It was recorded in the studio of The Hague's music venue Paard van Troje. The music is a strange combination of organ, synths, saxophone and no drums at all. It has a Soft Machine-ish feel, but also brings to mind the impossible to find release by the Dutch band Ellufant, many experimental Krautrockgroups and almost anything on the NWW-List. But all without drums. Very mysterious stuff, I don't own the Danger album but I might upload it to Youtube.
Back to the music on here: Floothuis and Lindijer created this music for Waste of Time's 1982 play called Zwischenfall. It's repetitive Casio-fueled minimalist synth music that tends to get weirder every second. I can imagine this music in combination with the mime-acting in the play. Very cool stuff, reminds me of some of the DIY Dutch eighties Zimbo cassettes and certain parts of Venezuelan electronic musician Angel Rada (the analogy makes no sense context-wise ofcourse).
Get it HERE
