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 live sets became legendary for their intensity. He never spoke. He never took requests. He once played a three-hour set where the tempo gradually slowed from 150 BPM to 60 BPM, ending in a wall of feedback so dense and warm it felt like a blanket. People stood in stunned silence for two minutes after the last tone faded. Then they cheered. sjoerd valkering
The turning point came in 2022 with the release of his debut album, (Resin and Dust) on the Rotterdam-based label Molekül . The album’s centerpiece, an 11-minute opus titled “De Verdronken Toren” (The Drowned Tower), told the story of a mythical church spire sinking into a peat bog. The track started with a field recording of water dripping. For four minutes, nothing else happened. Then, a sub-bass pulse so low it was felt in the intestines. Then, a distant, wailing melody played on a music box that had been dipped in acid. It was brutal, beautiful, and utterly hopeless. Resident Advisor gave it a 4.5, calling it “a masterpiece of controlled demolition.” Pitchfork’s electronic section called it “the sound of a beautiful world ending, and you’re the last one alive to hear it.” Sjoerd, meanwhile, was working a day job designing
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). He never spoke