Dutch Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of the most culturally fertile countries in the history of electronic dance music - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

The Netherlands absorbed house music from America and ran with it in ways no one quite anticipated. It was Belgian DJ Eddy de Clercq who first started playing house at Amsterdam's Club RoXY, and at first nobody showed up - people thought it was too weird. He was told he had one last weekend to fill the club. Then suddenly the place was packed, and after that it was never empty again. De Clercq co-founded RoXY in 1986 and became its creative director, responsible for promoting Holland's first weekly house and techno events, and the club became the cradle of Dutch dance culture for the decade that followed. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s in Rotterdam, a group of producers decided that house wasn't fast or loud enough - they cranked up the BPM, distorted the kicks, and stripped away the melodies, giving birth to gabber: the first truly Dutch style of electronic music, a sound so raw and confrontational it became one of the country's most significant youth culture movements of the decade. ID&T, founded in 1992, organized Thunderdome - a series of large-scale gabber events, the first of which drew over 30,000 people - while on the other end of the spectrum, a world-class trance scene was developing that would eventually produce artists like Ferry Corsten, Tiësto, and Armin van Buuren.

These tapes document a country that didn't just follow the global electronic music movement, it helped define it. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the record.