22.02.2016 by Guy Schwegler

Not from Africa, not from the Future: DJ TLR

The late nineties in The Hague saw a still yet-to-be-rivalled scene, known accordingly as The Hague Sound, emerge out of the sludge of punk and techno. In 2001, Jeroen van der Star, aka DJ TLR, a key player in that music community, founded Crème Organization. The label delivers a simple message: “Your misery is our mission.”

While Crème consistently broadened the “who’s who” of the international outsider scene and found its trademark sound somewhere between Italo disco, acid house and Detroit electro, the R-Zone label was created in 2013 following a different concept. Genre distinctions fell by the wayside, artists remained nameless, and only the rave moment counted. Jungle and Chicago? Sure. Ecstasy and paranoia? Why not? A “fuck you” and then generous delivery? Yes please.

TLR played at Lucerne’s Südpol just before the 2014 summer break as part of the Nacht club series. The next day, zweikommasieben author, DJ, and Crème Organization – and R-Zone-fanboy Guy Schwegler spoke with the positively bubbly Jeroen.

Guy Schwegler So, I wanted to tell you I’ve been reading some stuff about Afrofuturism [More Brilliant Than The Sun] [1] in the last few weeks…

Jeroen van der Star I don’t know man, I’m not from Africa… I’m not of a future…

GS Me neither. But the concept of nonlinear time interests me, and in the whole idea of the future that arrives from the past to save the present, I saw some similarities to your work.

JVDS Hmm, but that’s just physics – I don’t think Afrofuturism is very deep. I mean, it’s deep, but also not deep. There are a lot of comic book influences: super hero stuff, underwater people, this and that… it sounds deeper than it is, I think. Time is basically what we say it is – it’s just a word… It has to do with entropy, right?

GS Yeah.

GS For me, that whole time question is reflected in the R-Zone label.

JVDS Ah, ok, ok, so R-Zone has a deep astrophysical heart. [Laughs]

GS The stuff that your label puts out has no real orientation in time…

JVDS Hmm, no, it doesn’t – it’s all meant to be timeless. It’s of course nice when music is timeless, but it’s hard to achieve. You never know in the moment what will actually turn out that way. You find out later and think, “ok, this still sounds good after 20 or 40 years…”, but you can’t make it timeless. You can try, but you know…

GS So is R-Zone actively trying to release music that is timeless or that isn’t oriented in time?

JVDS I don’t know, I don’t want the music to be focused on a certain period or group of people – I want it to be focused on the music. And a lot of stuff now is very… very much all about names. Names, names, names. Every party has to have international guests, DJs, famous people, records remixed by blah blah blah, this artist and that artist. And a lot of labels look like a collection of names. That’s not necessarily bad, but I wanted to get away from that.
Back in the day it was a bit more open, dance music. It wasn’t about faces – it was about the feeling. The big houses of feeling – that’s what it was.
And the early raves and stuff, sometimes they could be massive, like really random: places that were really big, like squats, three days, whatever. There were lots of people there but nobody knew who the fuck was playing records. No idea. I’ve been to lots of parties, old school buildings, walls dripping with sweat, you know, literally. You couldn’t see outside. Nobody knew what the music was. You didn’t know who the artists were, who was DJing – no one was actually interested, because it was about the atmosphere and not about the ego. And now it’s very ego-based, very person-based. You see that a lot of people dance facing the DJ – I don’t understand it and think it’s weird.
So yeah, in that way I think that the R-Zone label is a bit retro, but also a bit timeless. Because it doesn’t matter what or who it is, and you can get lost in the moment. Like lost in space. [Laughs]

GS Had you had the feeling you couldn’t achieve that with Crème Organization?

JVDS I don’t know, man… It’s all starting to sound very pretentious now. I just wanted to space out. That’s what I mean – parties for losing yourself. It’s ritualistic in a way. It could be tribal, not in a musical way, but… parties have always been about losing yourself, about transgressing to something higher – doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t have to be real or anything. Now it’s so consumerist. I want a bunch of naked people in the forest, I don’t know. Pagan style, and I don’t mean Goa trance party style. It’s hard to explain. It’s not a pretentious thing – I hope. And with Crème, I just wanted to release a lot of music that I liked. I was in the right place: I had friends that made cool music, I’d started DJing more seriously back then, started to travel, made some money, and I thought, “What the fuck, man, I need to do something with this. I need to give back.” I was already a bit older and I knew that it wasn’t going to last. One or two years you’re DJing a bit and if that stops, well… So I thought I’d make something. I thought, “Now. Start a label.” It was possible then for me. I had all the connections, the friends, and the music was there. We had a good thing at that time. I was lucky – the people I was around [2] were making an original style of music back then. It really was a change, like from the old nineties stuff. The late nineties were futuristic, but in an annoying way, in a pretentious way. It’s hard to explain that vibe now, but the end of the 20th century was a bit strange culturally. The millennium was coming and nobody knew what was going to happen. People maybe knew everything would be fine, but there was a bit of a paranoid attitude. Everyone was scared of the “millennium bug” and all the movies were about extinction-level events. All this UFO stuff was culturally a big thing, like the X-files then at the end of the century. And the music was also not that interesting. People thought the Internet would eat the planet, virtual reality, blah blah blah… It was pretentious. We were in a shift at that time. And we had a different attitude than other people making electronic music then.

GS So you guys picked up that whole vibe and reflected it ironically with the Crème label?

GS But the Crème artwork is still quite serious…

JVDS Yeah, it is in a way, but it’s also… you know in the beginning we had the duck and the penguin and what not… nobody really did that. Snow scooters, the boys in the snow… not some rendered egg on a chess board made with a 486 computer, you know like, “ahh, ahh, future” – it was different, and of course that has to do with the guy who does the artwork. That was another case of everyone being in the right place at right time. I met him [Godspill] [3] at a party and he was very talented, and he stayed like that. You have to have the right people around you to start something.

GS So the Crème label’s start had a lot to do with having had the right people around you?

GS And the R-Zone was maybe also the right thing at the right time?

JVDS I have no idea, but it was also something I’d wanted to do. I started to notice that Crème was a bit… well, not
limited, but I couldn’t do everything there. It has a certain bandwidth – I noticed that some things don’t really work when I did them in that context. And I just wanted something different to play around with – different concepts. I can release twice as many records and still sell them. If you release too much on one label, it’s overkill. But if there are different labels then it’s ok. That wasn’t the main reason of course – I mainly just wanted to start something new. I kind of rediscovered that music – I’d gotten bored of it back in the day. I also noticed that people started to make different things. So it made sense, for me at least.

[1] Eshun, Kodwo (1998): More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.
[2] Among the friends and colleagues of Jeroen and the Crème label were Legowelt, Orgue Electronique und Bangkok Impact.
[3] Mehdi Rouchiche, aka Godspill, makes Crème’s artwork.