Valkering [top]: Sjoerd

Within weeks, the track had 200,000 plays. No one knew who made it. Speculation ran wild. Was it a side project of Ancient Methods? A lost recording from Surgeon? The mystery was the fuel.

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. sjoerd valkering

He didn’t send it to labels. He uploaded it anonymously to a obscure SoundCloud page with a black square as the avatar. The track was 140 BPM of pure, unrelenting dread. A kick drum that sounded like a pile driver on wet clay. A bassline that wasn’t a note but a pressure . And over the top, a ghostly, pitch-shifted vocal sample from an old safety instruction video: “In case of emergency… remain calm.” Within weeks, the track had 200,000 plays

Success did not change Sjoerd. He refused to play major festivals like Awakenings, calling them “the McDonald’s of kicks.” Instead, he curated his own events in forgotten places: a decommissioned water pumping station, the cargo hold of a rusted freighter in the port of Dordrecht, a Cold War-era nuclear bunker near Maastricht. He designed the flyers himself—bleak, typographic compositions using only the industrial font DIN 1451, often just a location, a date, and the word “SJOERD” scratched out in blood-red. Was it a side project of Ancient Methods

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.”