Missionary of techno: we present you Tromp

Picture Hedon Sonance / Annelies Kietselaer

Jelle Tromp gained a following as a techno DJ in the past few years by sticking to his own style: dancefloor friendly, but not too fast and steering clear of trends. This also earned him a residency at the Orphic community. Tromp’s drive is to make as many people as possible dance to the tracks he loves, so he’s happy to share track ID’s and plays a lot of released music. We at HEDON Sonance enjoy his sets even when dancing at home. So we went to meet him in our mutual hometown of Utrecht to talk about selecting music, technique, the perfect audience and how it all started.

Tekst André Kamphuis

A door opens in a dark street in the old Pijlsweerd district, a stone’s throw from the central station. Jelle greets me with a big smile and goes ahead of me up the stairs. We enter a one room apartment, conveniently arranged with room for sleeping, cooking, hanging around and mixing, without feeling crammed. A setup with CDJ’s and a mixer sits prominently between the table and the kitchen. I sit down at the table while Jelle makes coffee. He immediately starts talking with contagious enthousiasm, unconsciously answering some of the questions I prepared for the occasion.

Your sound is quite recognisable, energetic but not as fast as a some of your contemporaries. Could you explain how you developed it?
“I listened to all kinds of techno, from very hard to melodic stuff. I found that it’s quite a limited part of the genre I can use, but it’s more than enough to express myself completely. The nice thing about techno is that you can project almost all emotions to it. It’s like a canvas. The stuff I play should fill a dancefloor, that’s where I get my energy from. It’s like a hypnotic train. Like you mentioned, I don’t want to go too fast. At some point I thought, should I go in that direction? As I got booked together with very fast DJ’s all the time. The pandemic helped to get me out of this dilemma. I could focus on selecting music again and using it for my own purposes. Most of the tracks I play are older, from between 1992 and 2012. They’re not very fast, I speed them up to about 125-135 BPM. I love to take older records and taking them out of oblivion, introducing them to people who never heard them. So I’m not mysterious about my tracks at all, I want people to find them! I rarely play unreleased stuff.”

Since you’re happy to share your music, where do you find it?
“I literally use all the platforms from Beatport to Soundcloud, even Youtube which obviously has terrible sound but I just use it to qualify a track. I want to find all the hidden gems. I listen all day, I get up, put in my contacts, make coffee and put on music. I listen to my own playlists when travelling. Actually never to sets by others. I think I eventually buy 5% of all the things I heard.”

You want people to get to know the music you play. What do you look for in a crowd?
“I can play anywhere, I like to adapt. You can put me on as an opening or a closing act. But the people have to be there primarily for the music. I think I attract people who listen to techno at home. And who like to be surprised. The best moment in a set is when people look at each other and are like ‘I don’t know what this is but it’s amazing!’ Not the easiest audience maybe, but I’m just like that when I go out. When people are there for the music, the personality of the DJ doesn’t matter. I once saw DVS1 perform at Wall of Sound at Warehouse Elementenstraat. He intentionally didn’t have a light in his booth, so people didn’t know where he was. So they turned to the speakers, not to him.”

What kind of setup do you prefer?
“I like to play with three or four CDJ’s, so elements of different tracks can become something new together. A track always gets more interesting when a loop is added. Mixing with two decks is boring. I use a Xone:92 mixer because the controls are very subtle, you can make smooth changes from one track to another. With Pioneer mixers it’s just one track or the other, much too coarse. My mixing is quite intuitive. I don’t always put in a new element after eight or twenty-four or thirty-two bars, but when it feels good. It’s nice to see people putting their fist in the air but the drop they expect comes later”, he smiles. “That’s what defines techno to me, there’s no structure you should conform to. Everything is possible, it’s an endless adventure.”

How did you start playing techno?
“When I started listening to music it was to EDM and Skrillex, but when my older brother sent me some techno I was hooked immediately. The music seemed to have a direct link to my emotions. It surprised me, and still does. I made a Soundcloud profile to follow all the relevant labels. My first favourites were Ben Klock, DVS1, Marcel Dettmann and James Ruskin. I started mixing records in my room everyday after school for several hours. I was still living with my parents at the time, in Friesland.”

“When I was around seventeen years old, I realised that if I wanted to go to techno parties and play music in front of people I had to move to Utrecht or Amsterdam. My brother already lived in Utrecht so that was a bit easier. My very first gig was at a talent night at club Poema in Utrecht. Living there, I started going to events every weekend, mostly in Amsterdam. To listen to music and get to know people. At illegal raves, I met the people from Orphic, a platform for organizing events and supporting DJ talent. They gave me the chance to play at their events and I thought: yes, this is my audience. I love to work with smaller collectives like Orphic, but also Embodiment from Rotterdam, Frenzy from Almere and Nachtwerk from Amersfoort. They’re all about the music and have the mentality of illegal raves.”

What do you think about Utrecht in the context of techno?
“Utrecht is a much less crowded city than Amsterdam, it’s cosy. I know some people here who are also active in techno, but I spend most of my weekends in Amsterdam. That’s where most of my contacts are. Utrecht could use more clubs besides BASIS, WAS. and Poema. The latter seems kind of inactive lately.”

Did you ever think about producing tracks yourself?
“Actually, I’ve been producing for some time! I’ve got two unreleased tracks that are totally finished. I’d like to put out an EP.”

Got any other ambitions?
“I want to play lots of longer sets, four hours at least. I want you to be there with me for four hours. Ultimately, I want to play ten hours in a big club. In Berlin of course, but also places like Stuttgart and Leipzig.”

As with all our interviewees, we asked Jelle to name three tracks that are somehow important to him.

“This track infected me with the techno virus. It’s one of the first things my brother sent to me. The funny thing is no one ever hears it’s Laurent Garnier, it’s way outside of his usual style.”

“Probably the track I listened to the most. It’s heavy, but euphoric and uplifting at the same time. The melody constantly changes on top of the steady base, that’s why it keeps surprising. No bar is the same! When I listen to this track, I feel complete happiness. Because of nostalgia, but also because everything about it is just right.”

“This is my absolute number one! This is true techno. This is what I want to hear in a huge warehouse with just a strobelight. This is what I want to make myself.”