Top to bottom: Serge Verschuur of Clone Records; the Witte de With’s Defne Ayas; Annemiek Engbers & Peter Fengler of DE PLAYER.
Right: The smoker’s lounge at gabber legend Paul Elstak’s birthday extravaganza. Even though the music at gabber parties is hard and agressive, the dancing is anything but. It mostly involves a rhythmic shifting from foot to foot and small, controlled hand movements—not unlike knitting or crochet.
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prostitutes are easy to arrange. Some escort services even give you a bonus for bringing them business. I’m not squeamish about it. I’ll sometimes have a chat when the women come back downstairs. They’re just normal people like you and me, trying to make a living. But I suppose that’s obvious to most people. And if it’s not, it should be. Anyhow, in my position, you can’t really have taboos, because you’ll see it all. Generally speaking, the Hotel New York is a pretty quiet and civilized place. According to some of the staff, we have ghosts in the hotel. I don’t believe in ghosts and have never seen one myself, but some people avoid certain rooms because they can sense an aura, an entity. I do have plenty of experience dealing with visions of the supernatural. I’m actually trained as a psychiatric nurse, and I formed my first band, Spasmodique, together with a couple other nurses from the mental hospital where I worked. We actually started out by jamming with the patients in the hospital. The doctors all thought it was great, because this was in the late seventies in Holland at the height of the whole anti-psychiatry movement, so anything that wasn’t shoving pills down patients’ throats was more or less accepted. And that’s really how I started making music. These were the latter days of punk, so it didn’t matter if you could play. At the time, we were strongly influenced by the sounds of the port of Rotterdam—the noise of industry. The music was hard like the city— in contrast to, say, Amsterdam. We were also taking lots of speed and generally considered Amsterdam to be a stupid hippy town. Eventually, when Rotterdam started becoming increasingly multicultural, I put together a more world-music oriented project called Cobraz with a big African-influenced rhythm section. It was all about entering a trance-like state through music, and about the different kinds of cultures and musicians we met in this city. Everybody in the band was from somewhere else. The irony was that we actually split up because of “ethnic” differences: we had endless fights about food. ~
10:45 pm DJ DISTORTION – ROTTERDAM TERROR CORPS I would say that in Holland, the real boom in electronic music can be traced back to our infrastructure. Everything is really close here and public transportation is excellent. In fact, you can probably go by bicycle to most parties. That combined with incredibly tolerant drug laws helped to create a booming scene. Also, twenty years ago, if you needed a license to throw a party in some public space, you just asked politely and you almost always got it. That was then. These days, things are a bit different. The police demand twenty page descriptions of exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it. I suppose it’s somewhat understandable, because there have been deaths at gabber parties . . . but that can happen anywhere. One guy actually committed suicide at a Rotterdam Terror Corps party, but that had nothing to do with the music. At least that’s what the police said based on the note he left. Gabber is homegrown, but our biggest market is currently in Germany. And we’ve sort of stopped calling it “gabber”. That became a bad word in the late nineties, because it was so closely connected with advertising and commercial bullshit. When companies started using gabber to boost peanut sales or whatever else they were selling, it stopped being cool. Now we just call it “hardcore”. But really, anything can be hardcore. Speed is not the issue at all—it can be 96 BPM or 300 BPM. Naturally, some people start giving it different names the faster it gets, like terrorcore, splittercore, or speedcore . . . but really it’s all derived from the same thing, and that’s house. I can’t deny that speed and BPM played a role in the beginning though. One of our first tracks was “I’m a Gabber Baby”, which was
the hard, tough boyfriend of “I’m a Raver Baby”. At the time we were like, “’Raver Baby’ is cool, but it’s only 120 BPM—let’s go for 200!” Boom! Boom! Boom! We wanted to make our friends smile and our parents cry. As soon as your parents like it, you’re doing it wrong . . . even though my parents learned to like it because I’ve been doing this for so long and my father’s pretty open-minded. Back in ’95 gabbers were all over Rotterdam with their Kangol training jackets or bomber jackets, shaved heads, and Nikes. It was like a uniform for them. These days, gabbers just follow fashion. I mean, we stopped selling Rotterdam Terror Corps bombers in 2006. In general, the whole hooligan connection is pretty much a thing of the past. Of course, what we do is completely apolitical and the hardcore and gabber scenes were always mixed in terms of race—Rotterdam Terror Corps especially. One of our DJs is Surinamese. But there are some black sheep, tough guys who can only identify with fascism because they’re total meatheads. But they’ve pretty much disappeared. I would say the scene in Holland in general has also gotten a bit smaller. We used to play three or four nights a week in Rotterdam alone. Now there are maybe three gabber parties a week in the entire country, though the worldwide gabber scene has gotten huge. Paris, Tokyo, London, New York, South America, Mexico, Ecuador Hardcore. All over the world, gabber is very much connected with images of terror and horror, like all the flyers and posters with devils, skulls, evil clowns, guns, knives . . . It’s an image thing, and it’s pretty strongly connected to metal too. Rob Gee, Delta 9, the Industrial Strength guys in America—they’re all really into metal. And hardcore parties, like metal concerts, are also eighty percent male. Surprise, surprise. This isn’t a Katy Perry concert. But the girls that do come get treated with total respect. After I convinced a friend of mine to go to her first gabber party, she was shocked: “I thought I was ugly! I looked great and nobody touched me or even looked at me!” ~