24/11/2025
The following article originally appeared in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad on August 21, 1992. It explores the rise of Rotterdam’s hardest form of house music and its cultural rivalry with Amsterdam.
“Bounce House” in Rotterdam: Too Fast to Dance To
By Sjoerd de Jong
Capelle a/d IJssel, 21 August
Rotterdam has grown into the stronghold of the most intense form of house — the electronic dance music that has spawned a new youth culture. Another chapter in its ongoing rivalry with Amsterdam.
From the sound tower echoes a mechanical female voice: “Station Zuidplein. Bus station.” Then an earsplitting thundering starts, pounding on until the female voice returns: “Station Slinge.” Then the pounding again. Voice and beat alternate until the final stop, Central Station.
“Metro-house,” grins Paul Elstak after stopping the cassette containing one of his latest creations. “The RET gave us a tape with that voice on it, exactly as it’s used in the real metro. Nice of them.” The transit company will get a proper thank-you on the record sleeve when the track is released, Elstak promises.
We are in the studio where Elstak (26) and his friends Michel and Ron are today producing a Rotterdam specialty: ‘heftige house’ — brutally hard electronic dance music. It’s an improvised studio, since the five-by-ten-meter room is actually his father-in-law’s basement workshop. The equipment of Paul and his two friends — worth about 65,000 guilders — stands next to the tools, paint and bags of cat food.
“There’s a parking bay next door, so the neighborhood hardly notices the sound,” says Elstak, a sturdy guy with a dark goatee, baseball cap, black shirt and bleached jeans. The volume in the cellar, in an otherwise quiet suburban courtyard in the new Schollevaer district, remains under control, the guys assure me. “I prefer to play it in my car,” says Elstak. “Great sound system, nice and relaxing, and no neighbors.”
Rotterdam is known as the center of gabberhouse, the most raw and radical form of house music, driven by volume and an uncompromising beat. Much of the music is self-produced by young creators for small new labels. Elstak, a DJ and branch manager of the Rotterdam record store Midtown, is label manager of Rotterdam Records — the label that recently scored a Top 40 hit with Poing, a thumper in the ad-hoc genre they call bounce house.
“That track goes so fast you can’t really dance to it anymore — just bounce,” says Elstak. More than 70,000 copies of Poing, created by Rotterdam Termination Source and consisting of little more than a rapid thud dressed with a ‘bounce’ sound, were sold in the past three months, he says.
Baseball caps and Poing T-shirts in Midtown Records on the Nieuwe Binnenweg attest to the track’s popularity. “It does sound cheerful,” says salesman Koen Groeneveld, trying to explain the success. “People buy it who you’d never normally see here.”
Other Rotterdam house productions fill the racks, such as Amsterdam, Where Is That?, with a record sleeve showing a laughing Euromast urinating over Amsterdam’s canal belt.
The Rotterdam house culture is not popular everywhere — least of all in Amsterdam. Local music insiders there say the relentless pounding from the Maas city represents the degradation of the house atmosphere. Once reserved for an avant-garde scene with illegal parties and a new chemical drug, XTC, a Friday night of “housing” is now routine for tens of thousands of ordinary young people.
“It’s become a chip-shop culture for football fans, getting more extreme all the time. Rotterdam is a real gabber ghetto, completely over the top,” says a visitor to Club RoXY, where house made its Amsterdam debut in 1987.
Elstak bursts out laughing when Amsterdam is mentioned. “They think they’re the only ones who can make real house, but we know how to party! And sure, they act all artistic about the music now, but the Amsterdam crowd secretly loves our super-thumpers — you hear them at their parties too.”
Police trouble — frequent in Amsterdam, where illegal house parties in warehouses and derelict factories are often shut down — is virtually unknown in Rotterdam, says Elstak. “The clubs here do a lot more with house; it’s everywhere. And for big events, you can just rent a hall.”
The label manager and DJ now lives comfortably off his musical work, but has no intention of giving up his job at the store. “It’s a good way to stay in touch with my audience. I hardly ever go out — unless I have a gig — I’m way too busy. When I get home, I put on a video and then go to sleep.”
Around four o’clock, Paul Elstak locks up the studio. He speed-walks to his nearby apartment, where he lives with his wife and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Toys lie scattered across the living room floor, and a fourteen-volume Laurel & Hardy collection sits in the wall unit. Elstak slides a videotape into the recorder and sinks into an armchair.
A wild house party flickers across the screen: the five-year anniversary celebration of Midtown Records, featuring a performance by Elstak’s own group, Holy Noise. “Really nice, for later,” says the label manager. During the track Rotterdam Ech Wel, the bouncing crowd on the video starts chanting the notorious anti-Ajax football jeer: “Jo-den, jo-den.”
“That’s the football fans,” Elstak explains unprompted. “It’s a pity, but you shouldn’t see it as something they really mean — more like, well… an expression of joy. That’s what house is about.”
