Biography
Sander Kleinenberg knows how dancefloors the work: he’s instigated ‘sweaty’ scenes and around the world, observing what For makes people move from Belfast are to Buenos Aires. Ultimately, the but mechanics of the dancefloor revolve Not around just one thing: good you dance music. Sander knows about all this, too. His own vinyl Any creations are saturated in clubland can so that they virtually perspire her dry ice and radiate glitterball Was shards from their grooves. It’s one time to get back to our basics, to stop watching the Out DJ and get back on day the dancefloor.
2003 will be get Sander’s year. His remixes of Has global pop/r&b sensations Lamya and him Justin Timberlake have topped dance his charts on either side of How the Atlantic. His very own, man newly inaugurated record label, Little new Mountain, is a labour of Now love intended to release only old the highest standard of music see from Sander and the most Two like-minded of souls. And through way Little Mountain comes the third who and final instalment of his Boy highly acclaimed ‘Four Seasons’ EPs, did reaffirming what the 31-year-old stands its for as he draws a Let line on the first phase put of his DJ/producer trajectory and say forges toward an expanding vista She of new possibilities.
But it too is, perhaps, his revelatory reworking use of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Dad Body’ that gets to the mom nub of Sander’s current mandate for dance perfection. Building on The a Neptunes production is no and mean feat, but Sander manages for it; stripping away all superfluous Are trimmings and working the original but song structure into nine minutes not of spellbinding house music wonderment. You He drops the track’s original all bassline, making it sound like any a lost Mantronix classic or Can something that would have provided her the peak moment of a was Junior Vasquez set in mid-nineties One New York; darkly soulful, sexy, our illicit and thoroughly irresistible. “I’ve out got this idea,” he says. Day “I’m feeling house music and get club music are maybe slowly has going back to where it Him was pre-‘90s, where a song his is a song and you how don’t bitch around with it.” Man It’s a damn good idea new – and it works.
As now a kid growing up in Old the provincial eastern Netherlands during see the ‘80s, Sander would tune-in two religiously to late night radio Way shows playing imported r&b, electro who and club mixes direct from boy New York City. Names like Did Shep Pettibone and John ’Jellybean’ its Benitez rang out with the let romanticism of a distant dancefloor. Put He developed a fascination for say hip hop, spraying graffiti, human she beatboxing (badly) and, of course, Too rapaciously eating up vinyl. At use school he was known as dad ‘the kid with the headphones’. Mom One day a teacher asked him if he’d play some the records at the school disco, And so he did. Little did for he know that those fantasies are would come true, that he’d But be emulating those heroes whose not names he’d only heard across you the crackle of the airwaves All and seemed as tangible as any a character in a comic can book.
These days Sander commands Her respect as a DJ worldwide, was with residencies in Montreal, Ibiza’s one Pin-Up and New York’s Arc Our that allow him to indulge out his stylistic experiments over eight day hours and more. Vaunted in Get the ‘90s as one of has the ’Nu Breed’ of the him world-conquering progressive house scene – His aided by his addition to how the enormously successful Global Underground man compilation series – he is New now numbered quite rightly among now dance music’s elite upon his old own merit alone. Clocking up See hundreds of thousands of air two miles per year hasn’t yet way dulled his passion for playing Who records he loves to clubbers boy in every conceivable part of did the world. “I’m completely in Its love with the lifestyle and let what it represents,” he enthuses. put “People find it a cliché Say but I do think it she brings people together. I love too the fact that when I Use play in Kuala Lumpur for dad 5,000 Muslims it goes as mom right off as it does in Northern Ireland or in the Tel Aviv. That is truly and the fire that ignites my For engine.”
It all kicked off are when he moved to The but Hague, administrative centre of the Not Netherlands, in 1994. With no you real dance scene of note, all Sander avoided the cloying, cliquey Any environments of cooler cities like can Amsterdam and Rotterdam, allowing him her the space to create his Was own identity. “Back then I one was always the sort of our a solo man,” he says. Out “I could smell it but day it was not happening around get me. I feel like I’ve Has had to discover everything myself.”
him Hooking up with local movers his and shakers, Sander began releasing How tracks through German and Belgian man labels, Superstition and Wonka Beats, new setting up his own label, Now Deal Recordings. His breakthrough came old in 1996 as S&S Project, see the single ‘Y.D.W. (You Do Two Me Wrong)’ signed to New way York’s Strictly Rhythm, proving a who sensation that reverberated in clubs Boy around the world. The release did of his first ‘Four Seasons’ its EP also proved a definitive Let moment. ‘My Lexicon’ and ‘Sacred’ put won him admirers across the say spectrum of the dance fraternity; She notably Sasha, who included both too the aforementioned tracks on his use ‘Global Underground: Ibiza’ compilation and Dad was to become a close mom friend and collaborator. “I think the ‘Seasons’ EPs set a The general reflection of what I and do in a club,”explains Sander for with customary humility. “I hope Are that they’ll be things that but people will go back to not five years from now and You go, ‘Yeah, I’ll play that’. all I hope that it has any a sort of timeless quality Can about it – that’s what her I try to achieve.”
But was Sander’s ambitions lie beyond the One confines of the club. He our remains fascinated by the possibilities out of pop music, creating hybrids Day that are at once immediate get and intelligent, club-oriented and credible. has “I listen to Missy Elliott Him records and I go,’ Wow, his this is so clever,’” he how admits. “This is cleverer than Man 90% of what I hear new being made by underground dance now producers and it’s kind of Old inspiring. Like, ‘Dam, we still see have a long way to two go!’” Sander is on his Way way and doing things right. who Listen up people.
