Serge (Clone) – Influences

Man, where to start… So many influences. Lets start in my teenage years…
Trying to do my homework while getting distracted by the national Soul Show by Dutch legend Ferry Maat.
Every Thursday at 20.30 a fresh homemade amateur tape mix came up with loads of obscure imports, club hits and tracks I never heard before. Passion by The Flirts was a regular featured track… Often not longer then 1.5 minutes into the mix and I had no idea what it was (no tracklistings were provided. No Shazam, no Facebook i.d. groups, no TV shows playing club tunes or videos of these tunes…) but that synth hook, the bassline… and P.A.S.S.I.O.N.!!! My ghettoblaster at max every time!. Took me years to find out what it was 🙂
I could have picked 20 other tracks here, but this one just popped up first.
Actually… I truly love all those late 70s and 80s r&b and disco and soft soul that Ferry Maat used to play in his show. I grew up with that guy’s radio show… He played hip hop, disco, and electronic stuff like Kraftwerk… but I really got into it with the disco mixes and tunes like this!

The very first album that I bought actually two albums for the price of one… Madness – One Step Beyond and Whitney Houston’s Debut…

I knew Madness from a friend of the family who visited our little coastal town every summer and he was 10 years older and from Amsterdam and brought The Police and Madness into my life.
On my next visit to Amsterdam I bought Madness and that Whitney album (that I knew from the Soul Show). Only later I learned about the Specials and Ska and I actually wanted to be a skinhead. Didn’t make it any further than buying Doc Martins but I was also a surfer dude with custom made Vans and pink t-shirts, hanging on the beach all summer, so that was already a bit schizophrenic. And that made me realise that I couldn’t really belong to any scene or genre if I followed my own musical taste. Because which Skinhead was listening to Barry White or Prince?!. So I never shaved my head until recent years 😉 But I still have love for Madness and the Specials!!

Cant leave Prince out of this but since he silenced his youtube vids I need to go for Shelia E, Morris D and the Time or Appollonia 6

Prince is probably one of the biggest… I’ve got all his releases (except the last couple but that goes without saying I guess?). I was a proper Prince fan (or actually still am!!)
The guy is a genius. Via Prince I learned about the funkateers such as Parliament and George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and also all the serious funk bands.

Another radio show that had a big influence was Frontlijn and Krapuul deluxe by Luc Janssen.
He was playing loads of wave and early electronica and more experimental stuff such as Psychic TV… Front 242, Liaisons Dangereux but also all the early Belgium New Beat, acid from Stakker Humanoid for example. At this time the soul show started playing more of the early house and hiphouse aswell, so by the end of the 80’s it was all about electronic dance music.
Ibiza – Amnesia and Hysteria were such sick tunes… This was also the sound going in the local clubs (mixed with Rick Ashley and Kool And The Gang and top40 tunes). The only time you could find me on the dancefloor was with tunes like this!

Cant leave out Armando!
This was so much energy! While Stock Aitken & Waterman were ruling the charts you had kids like Armando, Larry Heard, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Ron Trent dropping tracks that had so much energy… They simply overruled all the other things I was listening to. That was music from somewhere else… so different.
This tune!! Armando is probably the one who brought the rawest and dirtiest energy in House music. “Trinity” was the only local club playing this, floor full of smoke, strobe on and me in the middle of the floor. I wasn’t a dancer, but I simply couldn’t resist. This was also the club where I started DJing. I never wanted to become a DJ or something… I simply wanted to hear and play these tracks that I liked so much. Today Armando is still an inspiration!

The tune that changed everything. Of course, there are loads of more obscure tracks but I’ve played this hundreds of times – I even went to sleep with it, waking up to the sound of the needle ticking the end groove…
Actually not only Acid Tracks but all the Acid Trax volumes and several compilations from that period.

After all the first big releases there was the 2nd wave. Without a doubt this Techno 2 The Next generation album showed me and many of my generation that there was more to it. For those in the late 80s not playing in clubs and visiting import stores on a weekly basis simply didn’t know about lots of great music until compilations like this hit the shelves. This wasn’t only club music but also a way of expression! It wasn’t the sound of the Soul Show or any other radio show or club, it was the new sound of our generation, the sound of the future.

I started looking for more and started following labels such as Metroplex, Transmat, KMS, Planet E, and very shortly after that many other labels including European labels.
Each track on this album is a classic. Carl Craig’s Element might be my favourite at this time, but all great tunes!!

More Juan Atkins. This is pure art!
Model 500 – Ocean to Ocean. This is what its all about for me… Not tunes that set every dancefloor on fire but this is creative, futuristic, fantastic, emotional and funky as hell! 25 years later I still want to play this – this is more Futuristic and creative then most music being released these days. This is why I’m a DJ, why I have a record store and all the rest. Simply because I love this and I really don’t care of there is 1 person who likes it or 100000.

I can go on with house, techno and electro tunes for hours. The whole 90s “IDM”, Aphex Twin, Autechre, etc etc. or some of the amazing jazz music that has been made. But this is what I’m listening to a lot at the moment and what really inspires me. It has what I miss in a lot of electronic dance music at the moment. Depth, Craftsmanship, Creativity, inspiration. I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of good music, because actually there is!! There is a lot of amazing music, but somehow there is not this momentum of groundbreaking new music from the 80s and 90s. In the late 80s Acid was music from another planet for us – completely alien. And for the younger generation who have been born after 2000 there are no sounds that they’ve never heard before, except maybe for this (randomly pick one of my favourite classic pieces, Stravinsky – Symphony In Three Movements.)

After all the music, a little talking about music.
How big is the contrast of the average music critic, music writer in dance music and Leonard Bernstein talking about Mahler?
This is a completely different way of talking about music. Like this week a “journalist” from FACT magazine asking me to comment on a Discogs seller asking €25,000 for a record and expects me to reply to his request to seriously comment on this because he is doing some clickbait write up, (which I kindly declined, and then not even hearing back from him after taking the time to answer him). I admit, Bernstein goes a bit abstract and takes his admiration of the composer (Mahler) far and makes it a bit dramatic, but still the contrast is so immense that it makes me realise the shallowness and volatility of dance music and also the longing for popularity and fame (and money) shouldn’t become the driving force in what I do! I’m not judging anyone who does want to become the #1 DJ in the popularity polls or whatever. But for me, its not why I’m in this.

After all the music, a little talking about music.
How big is the contrast of the average music critic, music writer in dance music and Leonard Bernstein talking about Mahler?
This is a completely different way of talking about music. Like this week a “journalist” from FACT magazine asking me to comment on a Discogs seller asking €25,000 for a record and expects me to reply to his request to seriously comment on this because he is doing some clickbait write up, (which I kindly declined, and then not even hearing back from him after taking the time to answer him). I admit, Bernstein goes a bit abstract and takes his admiration of the composer (Mahler) far and makes it a bit dramatic, but still the contrast is so immense that it makes me realise the shallowness and volatility of dance music and also the longing for popularity and fame (and money) shouldn’t become the driving force in what I do! I’m not judging anyone who does want to become the #1 DJ in the popularity polls or whatever. But for me, its not why I’m in this.