Within weeks, the track had 200,000 plays. No one knew who made it. Speculation ran wild. Was it a side project of Ancient Methods? A lost recording from Surgeon? The mystery was the fuel.
Today, Sjoerd Valkering lives a paradox. He is a cult hero who hates heroes. His music is sought after by vinyl collectors, yet he presses his records in runs of only 300, often embedding them with physical flaws—a skip, a warp, a spot of real rust on the label. He is rumored to be working on a new album, the only details a single Instagram story showing a photograph of a burned-out VHS tape and the caption: “Herinnering is een litteken” (Memory is a scar).
Success did not change Sjoerd. He refused to play major festivals like Awakenings, calling them “the McDonald’s of kicks.” Instead, he curated his own events in forgotten places: a decommissioned water pumping station, the cargo hold of a rusted freighter in the port of Dordrecht, a Cold War-era nuclear bunker near Maastricht. He designed the flyers himself—bleak, typographic compositions using only the industrial font DIN 1451, often just a location, a date, and the word “SJOERD” scratched out in blood-red. sjoerd valkering
Sjoerd’s journey didn’t begin in a club. It began in silence—or rather, in the absence of it. As a child, he was fascinated by the hum of his father’s old tape recorder, the flutter of a dying VCR, the feedback loop of a microphone placed too close to a speaker. While other kids listened to Top 40 radio, Sjoerd recorded the sound of a radiator hissing. He called it "the breathing of the house."
He didn’t send it to labels. He uploaded it anonymously to a obscure SoundCloud page with a black square as the avatar. The track was 140 BPM of pure, unrelenting dread. A kick drum that sounded like a pile driver on wet clay. A bassline that wasn’t a note but a pressure . And over the top, a ghostly, pitch-shifted vocal sample from an old safety instruction video: “In case of emergency… remain calm.” Within weeks, the track had 200,000 plays
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.
To the uninitiated, Sjoerd was just a quiet graphic designer from Breda. He wore plain black t-shirts, rode a creaking bicycle to his studio, and drank bitter coffee from a chipped mug. But to the small, dedicated cult following of the Koolstof label and the attendees of the secret Loodlijn parties, he was a prophet of the post-apocalyptic dance floor. Was it a side project of Ancient Methods
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).