Sjoerd Valkering Verified Guide

His first live show was at a venue called De Nieuwe Anita in Amsterdam. There were no lights, just a single bare bulb swinging over his battered mixer. He wore welding goggles. For 75 minutes, he didn’t play “tracks” so much as summon them. He used contact microphones to amplify the sound of him scraping a metal chair across the concrete floor. He ran a police siren through a modular effects chain until it became a mournful, rhythmic drone. The crowd, a sea of black denim and thousand-yard stares, didn’t dance so much as shudder in unison.

He didn’t send it to labels. He uploaded it anonymously to a obscure SoundCloud page with a black square as the avatar. The track was 140 BPM of pure, unrelenting dread. A kick drum that sounded like a pile driver on wet clay. A bassline that wasn’t a note but a pressure . And over the top, a ghostly, pitch-shifted vocal sample from an old safety instruction video: “In case of emergency… remain calm.” sjoerd valkering

Sjoerd, meanwhile, was working a day job designing labels for cheese. He’d come home, feed his cat, and spend six hours meticulously crafting the sound of a chain-link fence being rattled in a hurricane. His first live show was at a venue

He is not the biggest name in hard techno. He never will be. But in the cold, wet dark of a Dutch warehouse at 4 a.m., when the kick drum feels like a heartbeat and the noise feels like a prayer, the faithful know one thing to be true: Sjoerd Valkering is the sound of the void, and the void, for once, is dancing. For 75 minutes, he didn’t play “tracks” so

It was at an illegal squat party in Eindhoven in 2018 that Sjoerd had his epiphany. A DJ was playing relentless, four-to-the-floor industrial techno, but Sjoerd felt it was too… polite. The kicks were too clean. The distortion was artificial. He went home and that night, using a broken drum machine, a Soviet-era synthesizer he’d bought on Marktplaats, and a field recording of a collapsing grain silo, he created his first track: “Verlaten Fabriek” (Abandoned Factory).