A discussion with Sander Kleinenberg about the early Amsterdam underground scene, producing ‘My Lexicon’, being prominently featured on Sasha’s GU013 in Ibiza, his Global Underground Nubreed mix album, and evolving his sound.
This interview first aired on October 7, 2021.
Super Progressive: We’re back on Super Progressive and today I’m extremely excited with our guest. I’m joined by Sander Kleinenberg. Welcome my friend.
Sander Kleinenberg: Thanks, man. Good to be here and thankful for the opportunity.
Super Progressive: Let’s get into it. I have your Nubreed album notes right here, and the first thing I learned about you was that you grew up in the eastern part of Holland. Now you said that when you were a kid, not a lot of people thought DJing could be a career at all. So what was your first interactions with house music? And we all know Amsterdam to be one of the epicenters of the house music scene in underground dance music today, but what was the scene like at the time when you were coming up learning about house music for the first time?
Sander Kleinenberg: So the one thing we have in the Netherlands, which is really amazing specifically back then, it’s a bit different now, was public radio, and public radio had its core task to inform its listeners about the world and what was going on musically, culturally, any vibe, any direction, any subculture had to be featured or was featured by people that were interested in culture, and they were not specifically interested in how many people listened to the radio stations. There were three radio stations. So there was bound to be some people listening and this sort of open cultural vibe gave you a glimpse into what was going on in the world, which gave me my first sort of bleeps of underground dance music. Back in the mid eighties, I think I was like 13, 14 years old, there was a Thursday night mix show called the Soulshow, which was a DJ called Ferry Maat, and he played dance music from the dance floors of New York and Chicago and so on. He played a lot of R&B. And by the late 80s, 1987, 1988, he also started playing a little thing called Nubeat, which is a Belgian style of house music. A bunch of producers in Belgium sort of doing this industrial vibe with simple lyrics and simple shout outs, some drug reference, some space, some galactic beaming, and obviously Kraftwerk and all these German bands that were so important back then in Europe. And so that mixed with American R&B, everything put together gave me this sort of like, oh my god, this is so exciting. It’s like an alien beep, some foreign distant planet calling me. And I was obsessed. All my peers were chasing girls and I was glued to the radio, recording on a cassette, all these mix shows, and then played the hottest records over and over again during the weekend. I waited until the next Thursday, and I knew there’d be another show, and it’ll be more new and fresh records. And every night at 8:30 PM on that show, there was a mix done by DJs that would send these mixes to this mix show, and it would be like 20 minutes of records mixed together. And to me, that was it. It was the end. The end. I thought it was just the coolest vibe. So that was really my first sort of glimpse into electronic music, house music, night culture, nightclubs, black music meeting European industrial music. It was really the time I didn’t know what it was, obviously it was still in development, but it was definitely the first sort of branches of this new vibe, this new thing. And I came from Hip Hop and I did graffiti and I scratched a little bit. The turntable was still an infant, but it was there, and all that stuff happened in the late eighties. Then I started DJing at a club where for the next six years I was battling with most owners about how much of this new music I could play because they wanted to hear the Top 40 stuff. And they said, okay, I’ll give you 15 minutes to play that oomph music. 15 minutes. And then I had from the 500 people that go there, there were three people that were into it.
Super Progressive: So you must’ve been building some sort of record collection at the time. How were you coming into contact with these records? Often, we hear about these special relationships between DJs and record stores and how that’s kind of a glimpse into the scene. How were you getting some of these early records and who were some of the first DJs that left an impression on you?
Sander Kleinenberg: So those are two different questions, but I’ll start with the record store. One hundred percent. If you are a little kid from, in my case, the east of the Netherlands, and you would go to the, I don’t know, maybe the 10 record stores that were around that would sell this type of music, you would be at the back of the line, and then by the time you would hear the newest records, most of them, the white labels, were already given out to the more important DJs. So this whole thing was, it’s like, I don’t know, I guess it’s standing at the halfpipe and then you’ve learned your trick on your own all the time, and you’re waiting for that moment where I know Tony Hawk goes like, okay, show me your trick. And that’s exactly how it went back in those days with the culture around record stores, you knew, okay, it’s Thursday, Thursdays the day when the new releases come to the store, and you go to the store at three in the afternoon, and then you meet your heroes, and you meet some people and you’re like, oh my god, that’s Dimitri. Oh my god, that’s Remy. Or there’s people there, or even visiting DJs later on, visiting DJs from Detroit and Chicago. Amsterdam, as you pointed out, had, and still has, a strong link and a strong place in the hearts and minds of the birth of electronic music. Event organizers would bring the Detroit elite and the New York elite to Amsterdam, so you could see Derek May in the wild, and you’d be like, oh my god, there he is, the God of Techno. And then to your second question, the first DJ that got me into DJing was the first DJ I ever heard DJing. He was a DJ called WestBam. He is from Berlin, he’s actually the founder of the Love Parade, had a bunch of hit records in the nineties. He’s a huge rave DJ in Germany, and he DJ’ed at a club that I played at just over the border in Germany. The east of the Netherlands is bordered by Germany. And I played at the time at a club in Germany where a lot of Dutch kids would go because the alcohol laws were not so strict and people would visit Germany from the Netherlands. Also as an experience, I’m going out in Germany, so it was kind of a cool thing to do. So there I saw WestBam and it was the first DJ I saw that just played dance music and didn’t play any other music or Top 40 music. And I remember that the whole club kind of looked at it like, what’s going on? Why is he not talking through the records? What’s this thing? And he’s mixing the records together and it was kind of confusing, but I guess I saw a life which has been inspiring until today. But I mean from the Netherlands, there’s pioneers like DJ Dimitri, Remy, and Marcelo. Those three were the club kings of the Netherlands in the early nineties, and they were, to me, the ones that I looked up to and inspired me.
Super Progressive: So one thing we learned from our talk with Paul Oakenfold was back closer to the birth of club music culture and underground music, DJs and producers were actually two separate jobs rather than being kind of combined into one we see today. How did you make the decision to take this passion for mixing and start producing your own music? Or was it the other way around where you were producing music first and then found mixing?
Sander Kleinenberg: I mean, to be honest, I don’t know what Paul said about this, but to me, the two always had lived together. If I look at my heroes like Larry Levan or the producer of Madonna that produced ‘Holiday’, John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez. Those are all club New York club DJs, and then record labels realized, “Hey, if we get this DJ to remix the record, then he can translate what he does every Saturday into that record. And maybe if this DJ would play in a hot club like Limelight or Paradise Garage or any of those places where people would literally go to listen to hear new music, it would generate excitement. These A&Rs were smart enough to think, “Yeah, let’s just appoint this guy to remix.” So I guess the DJ was initially more someone who would remix. I think that’s a closer relationship specifically in the early days. And I think producing, I mean to define producing as well, the lines are so blurred. We say, yeah, a DJ produces a record, but you could also say today a DJ is the artist and he uses producers to help shape his sound. I think that’s a far easier or better way to describe what has happened to DJ culture and the whole journey of the DJ being the guy in the club dictating the dance floor and Saturday night between 12 AM and 5 AM is his territory, into what David Guetta has become is an incredible shift and an incredible journey, obviously a journey that I believed in and I thought would end up happening. I thought the DJ was so versatile and was somebody so easy to market that it was inevitable that the DJ would end up becoming Michael Jackson. But in that journey, there’s been a lot of stages and a lot of moments where you can question what was the role of the DJ, what was his position, what should we call him, and so on.cSo the DJ/Producer, I mean, yeah, Mark Ronson is a DJ/Producer, but I think, I don’t know, maybe we can name some other people where it’s a blurred line. What is he? Is he a performer or a DJ or a producer or a mixer or somebody who just gives vibes? It’s like, is Diplo a producer? Yeah, maybe. But he’s also somebody who gives direction and brings a vibe and has a really great taste in music. And I think all these things put together, I mean, it’s difficult to define where each sort of barrier was crossed, but it started for sure as it was born in the club that that’s where it’s stems from.
Super Progressive: It sounds like the word that is used a lot today professionally across all industries is curation.
Sander Kleinenberg: Yeah, I mean one hundred percent. That is what it’s all about. I think a great DJ is somebody who is simply somebody who curates really well, who goes through the fucking 10,000 records and goes like, okay, here’s 20 that I think are pretty good and I’m going to put them together like this. The journey and the storytelling and everything that comes with it, that’s all amazing, but it starts with that sort of, my mom and dad used to tell me, your gigs are not the job. It’s going to the gig. That’s a big part of your job, but it’s also managing those three, four hours of freshness that just needs all that sort of dedication to weed through all the nonsense to reap the fruit.
Super Progressive: I want to talk about the early days of you as a professional. Can you explain some of the relationships that were key to your initial ascension as someone in the scene?
Sander Kleinenberg: I mean, absolutely. So I made those first steps. The radio was important. Then I slowly made some waves in the local club scene, which was a battle in the late eighties because like I said before, the electronic music, my passion, was not really widespread, so it was a real sort of pilgrimage to get people to come onboard. And then in the early nineties, I met a guy called Ricky Da Dragon, and he was a producer based out of Rotterdam, and he had released records on a legendary Dutch label called Stealth Records. And he came into my town for whatever reason, I have no idea, maybe he was running away from the tax authority or I don’t know why, but he had an MPC60. I was like, oh my god. You’ve got to remember back then you needed fairly expensive gear to start producing. Obviously you needed to invest in a setup and all that. And it’s not easy if you just bought your equipment, it was like a choice. Am I going to buy the the Technics 1200 turntable, or am I buying a sampler? It’s like, okay, well let me get the 1200s first and then save up for two years and then maybe this or that. And then he came to town and he had an MPC60 and he was so good with it. He was fast, and it’s not an easy machine to operate. It’s not an easy machine to program. But I don’t know, he was open to be a mentor, and I think, I guess if I look back, he was my first mentor. He gave me a ride on that MPC. He let me touch it, let me sort of feel and understand how to program it. And I remember the first thing he told me was like, okay, I can tutor you somewhat, but first what you’re going to do is you’re going to wash my car. To this day, I remember that sort of like, okay, so you want to go somewhere, you start with the dirty job. He made it into this quite, if I say religious, that’s maybe a bit big, but he made it into, if you are ready to operate this, there’s a responsibility, and there’s a way of dealing with this energy that requires commitment and it requires some sort of sacrifice. And he was like, before you’re there, you have to do this. So it was really good. I remember it still today, maybe I’m romanticizing it, it’s been a while, but it’s like obviously this path has brought me quite a long way. So looking back, that was a really first step into this crazy ride and this crazy energy that I am a part of.
Super Progressive: I mean you say romanticizing, but it’s like those are the experiences that stick with you and provide a framework for how you’re going to go about building your career in this industry. So I think that’s a really cool story that you just shared.
Sander Kleinenberg: For sure. And it’s like I look at some elements now and it’s like I don’t want to be the old guy that goes like, it’s important to have these sort of stepping stones into becoming who you are and to come to real fruition. You do need those fundamentals. And even if it’s just a little while, I’m not saying that everybody should suffer for art, that’s not what I’m saying, but it’s good to have that embedded into your fundamentals, the knowledge of understanding where you’re coming from, understanding who came before you. I think to truly navigate that world, it’s important to know these elements. Otherwise it gets treacherous and you may become less humble, and with this road, you can only walk this road if you’re humble.
Super Progressive: I’m going to skip a little bit ahead to the specific story because I heard it in one of your interviews and it really was unique to me, but you have a track, ‘You Do Me Wrong’, that was released in 1996. And this track is successful in its own right, but you later on learned that it had its own completely different ascension in New York because Junior Vasquez was mixing it back to back at each of his gigs for a whole year.
Sander Kleinenberg: I mean, to be honest, looking back at it now, it’s such… let me rewind a few years because 1992 is when my first record came out, and it was through Ricky and this MPC60 that we just touched upon, and then slowly I made some other steps. I moved out to The Hague somewhere around 1993. And in The Hague I connected with more like-minded people. And obviously this industry grew a little bit and normalized a little bit. And it was enough for me to sort of take that sort of risk where I was like, okay, I effed up everything, school, whatever. I have nothing, no social life, no whatever. This is my only passion, a couple of hundred vinyls and this sort of dream to become a traveling DJ and to become a part of this culture in a relevant way. And so I started releasing the records, and I think it’s fair to say that around 1995, 199696, I hit a peak of my first wave of development and trying and obviously failing and then trying again and failing again and trying again and failing again until that moment where I released that record. And it was so weird because having pop success or something on the radio will give you obviously instant gratification. It’s like, oh yeah, of course it’s on the radio. I am somebody. But this was an international club hit, and it’s like I had no idea. I mean, I knew we were selling 5,000 copies or 10,000 copies, but I had no idea what it actually meant to have that type of effect on the world. I mean, I knew what happened when I got a record that was by some new kid from somewhere, and you read the credits and you go like, oh, this is amazing. This is A Guy Called Gerald, he’s incredible. Or this is Kenny Dope, and this is Masters at Work, or whatever. It was the way you got that information, you looked at the record sleeve. How cool are they? Can I get some info from this? Often there were like fax numbers on the promos and sometimes you’re dare to fax them. Hey, can you send me a promo, whatever. So this is the early days of communication with a world that was still very difficult to navigate. You couldn’t get there by Zoom or you couldn’t get there by whatever. You had to go there either physically to experience what a record would do in a place like New York or LA or Berlin. It was just hearsay. Or you would maybe potentially a month later read some Top 10 chart by a local DJ and you go like, okay, so apparently this did something, but what it did, no idea, there’s no YouTube to check out The Limelight at three in the morning. It didn’t exist.
Super Progressive: Before we kind of jump in and move forward with the GU era of your career, you talked about The Hague, and this is one thing that I kind of found in comments of your tracks on Instagram and on YouTube, fans of yours always talking about The Hague.
Sander Kleinenberg: So it’s the political capital of the Netherlands and it has had a very strong pop scene, a lot of really famous bands that ended up going all over the world. You could find The Golden Earring or Shocking Blue, they’re world renowned, like Golden Earring ‘Radar Love’ is one of the hundred biggest rock songs in the history of Rock, even according to you guys in America. So they’re from The Hague. So The Hague has a really healthy pop scene and also in the DJ scene, obviously, I guess as a reflection of the pop scene also, it emerged fairly early with a healthy dose of talent and I guess infrastructure. So they had a lot of really good music stores, stores where you could buy gear, so really healthy. But the mentality in The Hague, unlike Rotterdam, and specifically Amsterdam, is they don’t give you credit until you get a Grammy. There’s a bunch of people from The Hague, which is a small city, only a couple of hundred thousand people, but some of them made fucking huge records like Shocking Blue’s ‘Venus’. It is obviously a world renowned record. Anyway, so The Hague was important to me because I moved there and then my career furthered there and my record label was there, and I started a record label myself in The Hague. And honestly, the progressive music scene was born for the Netherlands. It was mostly born in The Hague. So there was a DJ called Remy that was extremely important. He played a mix of techno and trance, but really in the sweet spot. Labels like Deal Records that were picked up by Sasha. So Remy, Deal records, Exposure, Asta, they were like breeding grounds. And I was just listening to a mix from one of my favorite current DJs Ross From Friends. So he did a mix show a few months ago, and all of a sudden I’m listening, and I’m hearing a record, the record I did before ‘You Do Me Wrong’ which was called ‘Conflict’. And he plays this record, I think ‘Conflicts’ to me was probably my first step into full on Progressive House chords, basslines. The whole thing was like a hundred percent progressive house, and he played it just a few months ago in his set. So I was like, what the fuck is this? My favorite DJ is playing a record that I did 25 years ago. It was like the wildest sort of like, well, here you go. Here’s a little thing you did in the past and it comes back to you through somebody you admire. Anyway, The Hague is a breeding ground for the progressive house. I think in Amsterdam, they were all a little bit more sexy, a little bit more house oriented, a little bit more Chicago, a little bit more like that. And then Rotterdam was way techno, fucking one hundred percent Detroit, Gabber, hard industrial, and then the Hague, I guess we were just really in that sort of middle, we were literally in the middle, but it’s like we, yeah, we got fed by these two sounds and then this came out. And then I later found out that if you listen to old sets from Sasha at Shelley’s, he played all these records. I always thought up to the moment that we met and then the birth of Progressive house in the way that we know it in Global Underground, that that was my first way into Sasha’s DJ box. But apparently it had already happened five years before, and may as well been that he was the one looking into the credits on records and going like, oh this dude,, I know him, but all these connections where now it’s like you get these connections within a second because if somebody plays something and it’s online, you see that that guy plays something. But back then there was no digital catalog or backlog of what people did around the world. It was just like, yeah, I’m selling these records, but to who? I have no idea. There’s hardly any track record. So yeah, it’s interesting to see that The Hague was an important stepping stone for progressive house music.
Super Progressive: So let’s bring it to the Global Underground era if you’re cool with that.
Sander Kleinenberg: If we go chronological, 1996 S’N’S, ‘You Do Me Wrong’. It’s like, wow, these clubs around me are popping, and all of a sudden I’m being booked for the records that I make. And it’s like, oh yeah, it’s a dude that had a record on Strictly Rhythm. All of a sudden I’m booked in, I don’t know, Hamburg and Paris, and slowly, these doors are opening to the world. And of course I drove to Paris and then the promoter was nowhere to be found. And of course I never got paid for a gig in Hamburg. And of course, all these struggles and trying to make it in the world and all those sort of pitfalls and whatever, they all happened. But in 2000, I guess the world had moved on further. Cell phones were doing its introduction. My mom and dad stopped paying the international phone bills to do my business around the world, so I had to do it myself. I guess I grew up and Progressive House was, I mean honestly, seriously when those Renaissance mix albums were released and those first mix albums by Sasha and John were released, and the influence that these compilations had was obviously, it was a real next level of professionalism, of branding, the DJ magazines in the UK, Muzik Magazine, Mixmag, DJ Mag. There were slowly, it was it obvious the DJ became a real hero, a real modern day fucking rock and roll fucking hero. And with that came adoration and the whole creation of that personality and the myths that came with it and how that sort started traveling the world through new media was just breathtaking. It was inspiring and you wanted to be a part of it. I had then become a curator for a club. I was a Resident DJ at a club in The Hague, and in its first month of opening, I was in charge of creating the lineup, and I was like, I have to book Sasha. I have to book him, which means he has to come. I guess it was 1999, and I booked him for Christmas, but I booked him between Boxing Day, which is the 26th of December, and New Year’s Eve because I had his agent on the phone. Her name is Tara. And the agency was called, I want to say it was called Accession, but I think it was, it was called something else, not too sure. I think Lee Burridge was coming back from Hong Kong and had started that agency, I think it was called, actually it was called Tyrant. Anyway, so Tara called me, I called Tara like, Hey, Tara, so and such, I’m from the Netherlands. I want to book Sasha. And she was like, no, it’s impossible. He’s fully booked. I’m like, well, what if we try something in between New Year’s Eve and Christmas? And she was like, well, we could try the 27th, but are you sure? I’m like, yeah, I think I’m sure. I think that fell on a Friday or something, a day that I could do something which was suicide because who fucking organises a party between Christmas and New Year’s Eve? But I was like, fuck it. I have to have to book this guy. I want to have this energy in this club. So he was the first international or one of the first international DJs that I booked that had to fly in from somewhere else, and I had to pick up from the airport and then sort of take to the club. So I had to organize a hotel room. All these sort of variables that are now so fucking logical and it’s a whole industry, were then like, okay, how do I do this? And I think, I don’t know, I paid him 5,000 Dutch, which was pre Euro. So it was like we paid each other with our local currency back then instead of the European money. And I remember standing at the airport and then I thought, yeah, no cell phone. I had no idea who to call, whatever. He just had to show up. And I stood there and I was like, what do I look at? Obviously we’re going to look out for a guy with a fucking bunch of records. And I think he was a little rough around the edges. He had partied for quite a bit. I mean, if I say that he probably missed three flights before he actually got on that flight where we picked him up, it was probably true, in true Sasha style. And we hit it off, man. I think looking back, he probably knew who I was already, which to me was really weird because that’s not a concept that I could fathom specifically back then. But looking back at it now and the records that I had released, he probably did know who I was and gave me respect. We exchanged records and a friendship was born. A friendship based on, I guess sort of that common sort of idea. We’re going to fucking change the world. And I became a part of his agency and well, this is around 1999.
Super Progressive: Wow.
Sander Kleinenberg: And I went into the studio and I made ‘My Lexicon’. And I remember when I had ‘My Lexicon’ finished at nine in the morning, there was a guy, an intern that came in for his day of work and he opened the door to the record label that was next to the studio, and I told him, dude, come on in, you have to listen to this record. And I sat him down and I played in the record and he was like, fuck dude, fucking insane. But he was kind of going like, is he still awake? Or what the fuck is wrong? It’s like nine in the morning. What’s wrong? I was like, yeah, I haven’t slept, man. I haven’t slept for three days. You fucking sit down. You have to listen to this tune. And that ended up being Jorn Heringa, and Jorn is now arguably the biggest A&R in the world for dance music who discovered Martin Garrix and all these people. He works for Spinnin’ Records and every time we speak, I’m like, you remember that time? You were the first one in the world to hear ‘My Lexicon’ at nine in the morning on some random Tuesday, and look where you are now. So pay me!
Super Progressive: I don’t think you go into the studio and you’re like, I’m about to make one of the defining songs of this generation of music. But did you have some good momentum from bringing in Sasha? Were you coming in with good energy?
Sander Kleinenberg: I think, to be honest, I’m further down in life now, so I can look back at the rhythm of things and why things tend to happen more at certain specific times than others. And I truly believe that creating some sort of creative highlight or some creative peak is really hard to define within the moment because you are literally building. You can look back and go like, okay, so ‘My Lexicon’ probably started in 1996. You can kind of go like, okay, so you had a little taste of something exciting and you were hungry to try and repeat this. You were looking for inspiration. I called it ‘My Lexicon’ because I live in the Netherlands. It’s not like I can find some incredible singers that come into the studio and give me a performance of a lifetime. It’s not like Madonna will likely be born in the Netherlands. No, you got to be in a place like New York. So ‘My Lexicon’ is my way of expressing myself, my words, my emotions put into that record. And I mean, I don’t know, the studio was tuned to make that record as well. You got to understand back then you would have an analogue setup. You can’t recall an analogue setup. It’s just like that’s there for that moment and for that record. And you have to keep it there for a few days to finish the record. If you go and work on something else that is gone. I mean, this whole record was me as a crazy man running around in the studio and tweaking the knobs and opening the filter of the melody. And this was all in that moment. You could allocate some sort of digital information or media information to some of your filters and you can allocate, but a lot of it had to be done manually. If I had a stereo out on the sampler and six mono outs, I made the stereo out left so I had an extra channel of noise that I could add. So it was all fine tuning your environment by hand. It’s crafty work. It’s setting the compressors where you want them to be. I guess at the end of a few years of experimenting and trying and then it happened. And yeah, I mean I was extremely excited about that euphoric moment when the chord changes and the baseline adds somewhere halfway the record. But yeah, it’s like mathematics. I dunno. It just clicked. The energy just clicked, and I knew it was special. I didn’t know it was a fucking… you never really know it, what it ended up becoming for me.
Super Progressive: Was it cool for you to not only have a track featured on Global Underground, but to be one of the rare people to have two tracks featured and realize you’re making up one sixth of what some people consider to be one of the greatest mix CDs ever?
Sander Kleinenberg: No, that’s a horrible feeling (laughs). No, I mean, listen, it is such a two-faced, in all honesty, it’s such a two-faced situation. You hit some sort of creative peak and you kind of go like, okay, well, I mean, where the fuck do I go from here? It’s like the most relevant DJ in the world has just used two of your records on the most relevant and most looked forward to compilation of the year. It’ll probably give me a shit load of work and recognition. And what I did was, I guess is, I rode the fucking wave as good as I could. And I mean where later in life, some people later on in the course of the development of EDM and electronic music, some people ended up in places where they felt like they were not in control anymore of their destination and they were not in control or felt they had the idea that they were in control of who they were or whatever.I mean, look at Avicii, who arguably was also somebody who was just catapulted into this thing that he didn’t really particularly enjoy. And I can fairly say that I was catapulted into something I fairly enjoyed, but I’m not going to lie, at some point it also became quite a burden to ride that wave and to be known for that sort of guy that was friends of Sasha and fucking that’s it. And the self-destruct mode button that I pushed at some point a couple of years later had to do with that, this sort of idea like, oh my God, I’m now trapped into this thing was kind of suffocating because it also kind of means like, okay, so this is most likely the end of my creative. I mean, that’s a bit dramatic, but it felt like that it was sort of trapped into being that guy that would end up forever making that type of record and end up forever on those types of mixes. Although, I mean, in all honesty, I enjoyed those years tremendously, but I was hungry for new challenges.
Super Progressive: I think you have a very unique experience that I wonder about so many DJs. It’s like you have a big group of fans that truly love your music, but they don’t want you to change outside of that because they love that sound and you’re so good at creating a sound that they love, but you’re also an artist and you can’t be boxed into something. Does that inspire you or is that more of a conflict in your career?
Sander Kleinenberg: No, it’s not a conflict. I think you have to understand that you create soundtracks for people’s lives, and then those soundtracks define their finest moments. They define meeting their lover. They define becoming of age or define their first drug experience or the comradery that comes with being young, a part of a subculture, and again, maybe under the influence. And it’s hard to argue with the power of those moments. And I am purely blessed to be able to have given these people a soundtrack and have given these people things that they actually also can go back to and say, “You remember that? Let’s listen to that again. Oh my God, you remember when we drove there, when we drove this and when we were young?” That’s incredible, valuable. I feel so blessed to even have been able, and I say this as humble as I can… to be able to provide that soundtrack to their life has been the privilege of my life, honestly. Seriously. But the fact of the matter is it’s not fucking 2001. And I know there’s a bunch of kids out there that just repeat what they do over and over and again. And I guess if you ask The Rolling Stones, why are you still doing what you’re doing? They’re probably go like, well, I have seven wives and whatever. So there’s a bunch of reasons to stay in that thing, but being creative is not one of them. And staying creative or inspired is also not one of them. It’s like when you’re young, you build something with Lego or you build something with whatever, and then when it’s done, you kind of go like, well, fuck this. I can build something new. And I guess I’m still the boy playing with Lego, and it’s like my Lego was getting kind of big, but I still tried to tear it down to a certain part and then sort of rebuild or add elements to it that kept me inspired.
Super Progressive: Yeah, thank you for sharing your perspective on that because it’s just really interesting. And thank you for being so open. I want to ask you something about this album. I’m not sure if you can see, it’s your Global Underground Nubreed, of course. It is so cool to me. So we talked to Anthony Papa about his Nubreed. The Nubreed series sounds so cool to me. The next generation of superstar DJs at the forefront of the underground sound. Maybe not so much the journey you wanted to bring your listeners on, but it’s a series based around a new sound and saying something new. Did you go in wanting to say something with your music, or what was your mindset going into this mix?
Sander Kleinenberg: You want the honest truth?
Super Progressive: Yes.
Sander Kleinenberg: I wanted to do a city. I really wanted to be a part of the city series, and to me this was like, okay, whatever, dude, I’ll do this one just as long as I can end up doing a city, because the city was the holy grail. That was it. I don’t know, it was like a Sports Illustrated fucking cover, you know what I mean? It’s like this is it, this, it’s just, I don’t know, the biggest thing you could achieve as a DJ back then. So this came along and it was cool, and I loved it and I loved doing this mix. I just wanted to represent myself in the best possible way, you know what I mean? It was not as intense as doing the Essential Mix that year, which I did as well, which was kind of conflicting. Every mix you wanted to be special and you didn’t want to get one record mixed into the other. So during this whole period, there was some sort of battle going on between the Essential Mix in 2001, which looking back is probably one of my favorite mixes I’ve ever done, and a huge honor as well to me. What’s there to say? I don’t know. It was hard, man. I remember it was hard. It was hard to fight for the exclusives. It was such a battle to get Breeder or any of these producers to sort of allocate you with an exclusive or try to get your hands on something like that. And I think it’s very important to state that here. I think what set us also apart from the rest of the DJs was the fact that while we were a part of the dominant DJ sound or the most hyped sound, we were also a very tight knit group of producers and DJs that would hand each other the hottest records, and we would play each other’s hottest records way before they were going out. So you knew if you were going to go to a Sasha gig, you’re going to hear 10 records that are not going to come out for the next year. You go to a Sander DJ set, you will hear that instrumental Chemical Brothers remix or instrumental Madonna remix that Sasha only gave to Sander because they’re friends and he asked for it. So all that sort of exclusivity and the fact that you knew you were going somewhere where the sound was unique to that moment, to that moment in time, wherever we were at that time in the world. It was such an important element to the experience of going and checking us out. Not only because we individually were who we were, but we were also a fucking collective bunch of producers and DJs connected through this sound and through this hype. And so when the record came out, you wanted it to be filled with fresh fucking produce. You wanted it to be like, fuck, this is, or you had to choose something that everybody forgot about or not looked at, which was also obviously, so yeah, it was quite an intense process. Yeah, it’s taking the forefront to the limit almost. It’s like a hundred percent. But I also think this sort of almost analytical approach, It also destroyed some of the freedom of house music because it became quite technical and it became quite bro-ish. I’m not saying that girls are not into whatever that culture was, but back then, it was predominantly a male thing. And they would go wild on the details of like, okay, he’s now playing this record and he’s the only one who has that copy.
Super Progressive: Before we move on from this era, I’m just wondering, because location had such a big influence on these albums, you said you wanted a city series. I mean, every DJ wants the GU City series. Where would you have gone to showcase a city’s culture? What would be some places that you’d like to highlight?
Sander Kleinenberg: I dunno, I’m like a whore. I would’ve done any city. I may have fantasised about it. I’m not sure if there’s a Frankfurt or Paris, and I obviously moved on pretty quickly to starting my own series because I was like, okay, I’m a part of all this and it’s cool and dandy, but it kind of creates some hierarchy where it’s like they are the whatever Gods that did a city. And I’m the one that did the Nubreed. And I don’t know. I mean, it was cool. It was fun, but I felt like I deserved a little more. So I started my own and I basically started my own in everything. Yeah, I don’t know. I felt like there were also forces in place where, I don’t know, there was some ceiling and I was like, okay, this is where that is. You understand what I’m saying? And again, I don’t want to demystify it because it was incredible. And like I said, it gave me such an incredible ride and it was an amazing ticket, so I would never look back in anger. But the fact of the matter is that, yeah, not too late after, I thought it was time to move on. Yeah.
Super Progressive: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. This is an hour and a half now. It’s really awesome just to be able to hear your stories, pick your brain, and learn from you all about what dance music is all about. So thank you very much. Have a blast at your wedding. That sounds amazing. I hope you have a good time. Thank you, brother.
Sander Kleinenberg: This was awesome, thank you. See you when I’m out there in LA.
