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.”
His first live show was at a venue called De Nieuwe Anita in Amsterdam. There were no lights, just a single bare bulb swinging over his battered mixer. He wore welding goggles. For 75 minutes, he didn’t play “tracks” so much as summon them. He used contact microphones to amplify the sound of him scraping a metal chair across the concrete floor. He ran a police siren through a modular effects chain until it became a mournful, rhythmic drone. The crowd, a sea of black denim and thousand-yard stares, didn’t dance so much as shudder in unison. sjoerd valkering
He studied audio design, but found the academic pursuit of "clean sound" sterile. His thesis project, a sound installation titled Deconstructie van de Stilte (Deconstruction of Silence), was a cacophony of slammed car doors, breaking glass, and the slowed-down groan of a cello string being tortured with a violin bow. His professors were horrified. His peers were intrigued. The turning point came in 2022 with the
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). For four minutes, nothing else happened
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).
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.