Speedy J “Something for Your Mind”

The birth of our underground brand Factory 93 not only brought on an adrenaline rush reminiscent of the renegade warehouse era of raving—on which Insomniac was founded—but it also had us thinking back to all the people, places and parties that made this whole operation possible. And with that came a burning desire to crack open our collection and dust off the classic records we couldn’t live without. Through our From the Crate series, we’ll be breaking out both seminal and obscure cuts alike, imparting some knowledge in the process.

Early ‘90s Rotterdam was proud to be grim. The Netherlands’ second city still in many ways stands defiantly as counterculture to Amsterdam’s relatively more refined palate. But Rotterdam was blown to smithereens by the Germans during World War II, and it was still getting its footing some 35 years after the fact. Much in the same way Detroit had homegrown sounds to reflect its heinous postmodern collapse, the Rotterdam genome was gritty, raw, and in a word: hardcore.

Rotterdam also pushed a scene called gabber out of its musical birth canal at the same time. An intense, bloodied, chav electro of sorts, whose tempo ranged in the 180s, gabber was profane, drug-addled, often violent, and utterly tasteless. One may call it a complicated delivery. Think tracksuits, shaved heads, gold chains, piles of speed, and some pretty special dance moves. But that was the point. It was a major “fuck you” to the world, albeit a particularly wound-up fuck you, at that.

While some Dutch ravers snorted, headbanged, and screamed “HAKUUUUH!” at Thunderdome, Joachim Goerge Paap, aka Speedy J, was manipulating his own spin on the hardcore sound that became synonymous with his home turf. He wound down the tempo, kept the bass kicking just as hard, and pared down his melodies. As a result, he turned a very different set of minimal techno ears his way. He also began laying down the earliest bricks of what would later be lovingly labeled “intelligent dance music” (IDM).

J’s “Pullover” proved to be his breakthrough track in 1992. The song was a phenomenal success and positioned Paap as the unlikely Dutch liaison for techno’s second wave. A year later, his debut album, Ginger, would be released on Ritchie Hawtin’s Plus 8 label in Canada. It was licensed for Warp’s Artificial Intelligence album series, which included other classics of the time, like Autechre’s Incunabula. From there on out, Paap’s uncompromising vision continued to serve as a trailblazer for left-of-center dance music.

But how did Paap, a man swimming around the docks of a port town of gabber, land himself in his Detroit niche on the other side of the pond? Speedy J itself hardly sounds, as a name, like Boards of Canada. It all turned out to be a happy accident, name included. He had a love for hip-hop and electro in his early years and began creating music in his bedroom (like every good IDMer should) with a tape recorder and a turntable. He dug through crates and pulled Chicago and Detroit hits, which were foreign and ignored by everyone around him. His friends also owned a radio station outside Rotterdam, and he’d use their phone line to call up Transmat, KMS, and Underground Resistance to get promos.

Listen not-so-closely, and you can hear Derrick May, Kenny Larkin, Daniel Bell, and what would become Paperclip People (Carl Craig) seeping through the sweat of “Pullover.” The same goes for “Something for Your Mind” (1991), a more amped version of his minimal sound and perhaps a clearer cross-trek between his local hardcore and the larger global scene. But “Something for Your Mind” is a fucking hell of a banger at that. While you’d have to be over 44 today to remember hearing it in a rave, you still can hear its influences in the EDM scene if you’re 20. They just don’t make tracks like it anymore. The lyrical hook, sampled from C’hantal’s “The Realm” (1990), pretty much makes the track impossible to forget. Simple, vicious, and to the point, it’s as gnarly as a gabber chick smoking Pall Malls the afternoon after the rave, yet it reeks of proper dancefloor class, all the while making your brain explode.