Coming back from 2000 and One: Interview

Coming back from 2000 and One: Interview

12 September, 2008 | 1.42PM

• Written by: Ben Raven
• Filed under: Music News: 100% pure, 2000 and one, holland, intacto

The festival headlining Dutch underground star tells us one of dance music’s craziest comeback stories.

He might be one of Holland’s biggest DJs but it’s crazy to think that five years ago Dylan Hermelijn was a washed up DJ, working in IT and wearing a suit and tie.

Dylan began his career as Holland’s first acid house producer back in 1988.

In 2008 he’s one of the underground’s biggest stars, headlining festivals in his hometown of Amsterdam and churning out incendiary remixes and records on his own seminal labels 100% Pure, Remote Area, Area Remote and Intacto.

Now he’s about to add another label to his collection.

Bang Bang, is a new imprint with Sandy Huner, another old friend who fell out of the game only to return to ride the new wave of underground house currently rocking Europe.

It’s debut release is a double track EP from Dylan and fellow Dutch house producer Melon, both tracks of which are currently being smashed on promo play in all the right clubs.

The release is another addition to Dylan’s glittering discography of landmark tracks.

But how did Dylan fall from the top tier of Dutch dance music only to reclaim his place once again?

Tell us about your background?

My mother’s from Amsterdam and my father’s from Surinam in South American which used to be a Dutch colony.

I was born in Holland but grew up in Surinam for part of my youth.

Surinam its like a melting pot of cultures.

My father’s background is Portugese mixed with West African slaves brought by the Dutch and Scottish slave traders.

My last name comes from the Scottish name Hermelin.

Far away in the 1500s Hermelin was a Scottish slave trader and my great, great, great, great, grandmother was a slave from Cameroon.

How did you discover dance music?

When I was 13 I was into ’80s hip hop and electro.

My father worked for KLM and I could fly for very cheap to cities in Europe so every month I went record shopping in London.

At 15 I was the main scratcher in a hip hop act.

By 1988 I was still going to London and buying hip hop and one month the seller was playing this strange house record.

I asked what it was and told it was this new music from Chicago called acid house.

A guy next to me in the shop told me he was doing a party that night and invited me.

I later found out the guy was [acid house and techno pioneer] Baby Ford.

I went to the party that night and it was crazy.

I knew about house music already but I didn’t know the underground stuff.

This music blew my mind

Were they playing acid house in Holland?

I went to my local record store and asked them if they had any acid house and they told me no one bought it so they kept it in the discount section.

Only me and another guy had ever shown any interest and he turned out to be Eddy De Clerq, the owner of the legendary club, The Roxy.

So I went there and they were playing pop music so I told him to play acid house and when he did the dancefloor cleared.

This was spring and that summer I went to Ibiza by chance without knowing it was a party island.

So in ’88 I went to all the great clubs there and when I got back and went to the Roxy in September there was a queue of 100 metres and acid house had blown up.

How did 2000 and One begin?

From that summer on I didn’t buy any hip-hop any more I was fully into house.

I started 2000 and One with my friend Daniel who’s now a big gabba DJ called DJ Dano.

At school I was playing acid house to everyone on mixtapes and one of the guys told me: “You know that sound they use to make the acid sounds?

“I’ve got one of the machines that makes it at home.”

“It’s a Roland 303, it sounds like shit but all the tracks on the tape you gave me have that bassline.”

He brought it to school the next day and I listened to it on my headphones and went completely crazy.

Daniel had exactly the same machine except his was a 606 drum computer and I said maybe we should hook them up.

So we did and it was crazy, exactly like the records we were buying.

We played our first illegal acid house party, Planet E, and we jammed for two hours only with a 303 and drum machine!

That was the autumn of 1988.

The next week a guy brought us into the studio, we did a jam session and released it on Lower Eastside as the first 2000 and one record.

We eventually parted ways when he got more into hardcore and I got more into Detroit techno.

Where did the name come from?

It was the PIN code of my bank card back then and we had to come up with the name quickly.

We thought it sounded futuristic because of the film of the same name.

From then onwards things went insane.

The scene was exploding everywhere, there were parties and raves everywhere and everyone got involved.

As the Nineties continued, I got more into Detroit techno and Chicago house people like Mike Dunn and Tyree Cooper and my sound was a combination of both of those sounds.

In the mid ‘90s dance music was evolving into a harder and harder sound.

It went from 125 bpm-135 bpm and that’s when I lost my interest.

I got into drum & bass instead and started two labels, Black Jack and Focus.

By the end of the 1990s I was still running 100% Pure and released Steve Rachmad’s second album.

It was really melodic and Detroit orientated and not really hard and because of the times it didn’t sell.

At the same time my distributor went bankrupt so I was completely in debt.

I had to stop DJing in 1999 and get a normal job to find the money to pay off my debts.

I found work with a computer company called Cisco Systems.

I luckily had a business economics degree and at that time the Internet was booming and anyone who could work with a computer was hired.

In 2003, however, I started itching.

What made you think about dance music again?

I started imagining myself doing this job until I retired and I became depressed.

I’d long stopped going to rave and house parties so I never saw anyone from the scene and I was in a completely different world.

So in 2003 I started to itch.

I had flashes in my mind of the music and I saw they were still doing [big Dutch festival] Dance Valley and I heard about this big Dutch DJ called Tiësto who I knew him from record stores in the past.

Then I started searching for DJ sets from people I knew like Laurent Garnier or Richie Hawtin.

One weekend I went to a friend’s baby’s birthday party.

I met an old friend, Shinedoe [fellow Dutch DJ and co-owner of Intacto Records] from the ‘90s.

I asked her if she was still DJing and she invited me to see her play at Dance Valley.

At the gig a friend told me to check out these two DJs.

She said they were from Germany but they weren’t German and she said I should listen to them because they play a sort of mid-’90s style.

So I went and there was hardly anyone in the tent but I heard some crazy sounding stuff so I asked the DJs who they were and it was Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos.

I was totally blown away and it was exactly like the same feeling I had in ‘88.

I found out there was this completely new scene evolving from Germany with all these producers like Tobi Neumann and Guido Schneider.

How did you react?

I was overwhelmed.

I thought “what the hell? I’ve been away for a few years and its evolved into this sound? Thank god!”

I was so happy I could have cried and it was a sign I had to jack in my job and do whatever it took to get back into the music.

Luckily my company made me redundant, I got a couple of month’s salary and joined the scene again.

That’s how I met all the new generation of Dutch producers and DJs like Boris Werner and Lauhaus.

They weren’t producing at that time.

I had all my equipment and experience from the past and in combination and I started my 100% Pure label again.

I put out Shinedoe’s ‘Dilemma’ which was an instant hit in the scene.

I made an obscure-sounding techno track with a five minute intro called ‘Adonai Elohim’ and Sven Vath really pushed it, put it on a Cocoon compilation and made it a big hit.

I got so much attention.

In Holland there was no one who was infiltrating that scene and it put me on a roll again.

My big advantage was that in the early 1990s I was making so many different projects under different names that I was never a big name so when things happened again for me I was kind of old school but new at the same time.

I never planned any of it, it just happened.

I guess it was just meant to be.

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