De Missie: how to make your city dance

De Missie: Mattijs (left) and Delano (right). Picture by Studio Mimik — De Missie: Mattijs (left) and Delano (right). Picture Hedon Sonance / Annelies Kietselaer

The city of Eindhoven was at the forefront of the house and techno boom in mainland Europe, as early as 1988. It spawned the very influential DJ’s Miss Djax (also label boss) and Lady Aïda and hosted parties where some of the original Detroit techno DJ’s played. With the repurposing of the spectacular industrial Philips buildings in more recent years, you’d expect it to be a little techno paradise in between Amsterdam, Antwerp and Düsseldorf. But no dedicated techno club exists in Eindhoven and all-night parties are barely possible. Techno and house collective De Missie strives to change all that, and more. We had a chat with founders Delano and Mattijs about their vision, plans for multi-venue raves and De Missie’s very first musical release featuring Cynthia Spiering among local talent.

Two young guys in their twenties appear on the laptop screen, in front of a big open wardrobe. They chose the bedroom of one of them to be interviewed. Mattijs Bouwmans introduces himself as the business side of De Missie, while Delano Legito explains he’s the creative mastermind and one of De Missie’s resident DJ’s. They seem to perfectly complement each other, rapidly taking turns answering questions and bringing up topics themselves.

Picture Studio Mimik — Delano in front. Picture Hedon Sonance / Annelies Kietselaer

How did you start out with De Missie?
“We just had small parties at friends’ houses with about 15 people present, chilling a bit but also trying to seriously mix records. It grew from there, there seemed to be a demand for house and techno parties in Eindhoven that was not being met. You could dance every once in a while, but there was no scene, no community. Our first proper party was in 2019 at the Temporary Art Center, across from PSV soccer stadium. The venue has a garden so there was music inside and in the open air. It drew 400 people. Our second party, with just techno, sold out as well, with 700 guests. It was held at Lab1, a former cinema in the city center. Because of different rules applying in the center, it could go on all night. The next one was scheduled for May 2020 but we all know what went wrong with that.”

What have you been doing since the pandemic started?
“We’ve been very busy building our techno and house community through regular podcasts and biweekly radio shows at RaRa Radio, a local online radio station. We feature sets by our own residents, but also by DJ’s from other collectives like Orphic and Traum. We like to collaborate with like-minded people, wether from Eindhoven or elsewhere. The radio show is now only two hours every other week, but after corona we want to do all-day shows at RaRa every four weeks in which we play music and have discussions with guests. It’ll be good to have a coherent dance program. RaRa is so diverse, we sometimes start our show after an hour of spoken word” they explain grinning. “We want to invite people from DayDayGay as guests, they organize gay parties in Eindhoven. There’s a need for that, because in Eindhoven there’s just one gay bar and there’s no good dance music there. Also, we like to have people over from Plasma, and there’s our friends of Schimmer Records from Stuttgart.”

At the end of last year, you announced some ‘fun stuff’ planned for 2021. Could you tell us more about that?
“We’re very proud to release our first vinyl album very soon! It’ll feature new tracks by our own residents Dissolver and Delano Legito as well as Cynthia Spiering and Paul Laurens. On top of that, there’ll be four bonus tracks released online: by Max Rfr, Jelle Zijlstra and two producers on Schimmer Records.”

De Missie is Dutch for ‘The Mission’. What is your mission?
“We want to build a techno and house community in Eindhoven, where people can meet at regular club nights. There are some parties and festivals, but no dedicated club you can build a scene around. There is of course Effenaar, an all-round venue for pop music with a long history of club nights, and the STRP festival for arts and music. We think there’s room for more.”

Eindhoven is certainly no 90s Berlin in terms of regulations. A lot of brilliant old industrial buildings at the former Philips site Strijp S were repurposed as restaurants and bars, but no real nightlife. In the Netherlands, old industrial buildings often are made into something raw-ish but quite slick. With high real estate prices and a huge housing shortage, there’s not a lot of makeshift clubs or squats to be found. Arty, unpolished spaces are mostly a temporary thing that will have to make way for homes or offices in the near future. Municipalities and project developers gladly allow these temporary ’incubators’ because they generate positive attention for unloved places with zero costs.

“We have all these great Philips buildings but you can’t have all night parties there, as they are located outside of the center. At Strijp S there’s for instance a venue under Area 51, a skatepark. Lots of people tried to host a party there, but it never happened so far. Or take the Koelhuis, at the site of the former Campina dairy factory. A great techno location, but you can’t put on an all-nighter. When you do find a location in the center, 24-hour parties are only allowed ten times a year”. This is a very different situation compared to Amsterdam or Groningen. In the first, specific rules allow clubs to go on for 24 hours or weekenders, in the latter bars have always been allowed to be open around the clock.”

Delano and Mattijs explain that they want to put Eindhoven on the map in the world of electronic music. They try to persuade the municipality to change their policies, together with the local ‘night mayor’. “Our aim is to form a kind of ‘love triangle’ with the bigger cities in the west of the Netherlands and with the Cologne/Düsseldorf area in Germany.”

Do they consider fostering local talent as part of their mission?
“Yes, definitely. You know, we’ve had some great DJ’s from Eindhoven in the past, like Aïda, Miss Djax and Albert van Abbe. But artists like Aïda and Miss Djax don’t stick around when there’s nowhere to play and no one to work with. Albert by the way still lives here and is very supportive of the scene. During his latest HÖR session he played the track ‘L.A. Pulse by Delano.

We want to put local talent on the line-up and promote their work. Dissolver for instance really grew as a DJ together with us. And there’s Max Frimout, a great DJ but also producer working with modular synthesizers. He is also great at mastering. Furthermore, we like to collaborate with other organizers in Eindhoven so we enhance each other. There’s no use in competing. When other crews do a podcast, we won’t do another on the same day.

When restrictions are lifted, we’ll launch a training program for young DJ’s: BIOTOOP. They will meet every six weeks, set goals together and chat about building a scene. And they get to use CDJ’s for free. It’s a collaboration with Dynamo.”

You seem to cover a broad spectrum of electronic music.
“We don’t want to confine ourselves to one kind of techno or house. We like to program different kinds of music depending on location, the time of the party and even the season”. Mattijs adds he thinks he likes house more in the summer and techno in wintertime. At the end of the article, the two present three tracks representing their own tastes.”

Do you have specific rules or door policies at your parties?
“We do want to create an atmosphere that’s safe for all kinds of people. People of colour and the LGBT community should feel totally free to join in, for instance. But our door policy is not very picky, we’re no Berghain. We feel we can’t be as strict as that as we’re still building a scene, we want to include people, not turn them away. And it’s just not in our nature to be assholes”, they laugh. “There’s definitely some racism in regular Eindhoven bars. We’re a bit of a farmer’s town after all. But up till now, it is our experience that our parties feel so underground that narrow-minded people just don’t show up, maybe they sense it’s not for them.

We would love to have partygoers walking around barely naked, but the city seems not ready for that yet. We hope to build a community in which people feel free to do that, but it takes time. But we already attract a diverse crowd, not just young people. And we try to have diverse lineups with not just white males. Music is our first priority however, we really want to make sure the music is great to us, whoever is behind the decks.

One of our few rules is a no photo policy, we want you to focus on the music. Our security people are always watching for improper behavior and we encourage guests to step up to them when they feel intimidated or see something fishy. We do have a blacklist. For example, some guy just kept making photographs and pushed us when we spoke to him about it, he’s on it.”

What are your first plans when the pandemic is over?
”We are planning to do a 24-hour party at multiple venues. That way we work around the rules. The idea is to make a bold statement to the local government, to draw attention to the fact that it’s hard to organize such a party in Eindhoven. But also, it would just be nice have a change of scenery during such a long party. When you’re at one location and there’s no place to just chill and eat, like club Bret and Radion have, it can become a bit too heavy. What we want to do is start at 14.00-22.00 at the first location, than 22.00-08.00 at the second location and 8.00-14.00 at the third location. We took inspiration form Vault, they wanted to do a party at club Shelter and at Bret alternately.”

Text by André Kamphuis

We asked Mattijs and Delano to bring three tracks that are special to them.

“This guy puts out one dark banger after the other. It’s not very fast, but very compelling”

“Another dark one, it seems fast but it isn’t, just 135 BPM. Dark, nut not evil”

Delano Legito – Deconstruction (not released yet)

“This one by Delano is going to be on our VA. It’s dark, but not industrial, we call it a basement vibe. Music to just dance on and on”