Q. When did you first become interested in music?

Music has been in my family for as long as I can remember, I guess it’s in my genes.

Most of my family members participated in several organisations like drum bands and marching bands, with most of them playing instruments themselves. This meant that my interest in music started quite early.

I was 8 years old when I got my first set of bongos. Quite soon after that I also received a CD of Masters of Hardcore from a classmate, that was really the first moment I got in touch with a heavier electronic genre which was completely new for me. I was instantly hooked.

When I was 15, I went to a big indoor party, called “BLACK”.

They hosted the event in the Ethias Arena in Hasselt, Belgium. From that moment onwards my interest in electronic music only grew bigger and bigger.

Q. You mainly create Hardcore Techno/Hard Techno, when did you first discover these genres?

I’ve discovered Hardcore at a pretty young age, I guess this was around 2002/2003. For me this was something amazing, the feeling of discovering something new in music is one of the best things there is. This sparked a lot of my interest in electronic music, after which I started doing some investigation on where you can enjoy this music on a big loud sound system.

My investigation resulted in finding great festivals and parties where you could go to and have an amazing experience. I went to many local parties that played Hardstyle/Hardcore but also a lot of big parties which had several area’s you could explore and find exactly the style that you liked.

There are many moments during these events that have influenced me but there is one moment in particular that I will never forget. It was the Hong Kong Violence Horror House on Dominator 2013 Carnival of Doom. This was just one big chaos area which blew my mind from the moment I walked in. This moment was brutal in its own beautiful way and I’m really glad I was able to witness that.

From this point on you could say that I have been influenced a lot by HKV's music.

Q. What was your teenage years like?

I grew up mostly with playing video games, watching movies and I had an interest in tuning scooters.

We had a big barn with a pool table, a fridge, some dj gear and 2 couches, the time I’ve spent in there during my teenage years was unreal.

Almost every weekend we would host small parties for friends and just hang out and enjoyed the night. We would play some games on the pool table and play some tracks on the old dusty DJ gear. During the weekdays after school, I was either trying to make music or play Gears of War, Quake or I was working on my scooters in the barn. My interest definitely shifted a lot more once music became more and more serious.

Q. When did you start your musical career? When did you first start writing songs?

I’ve been working with FL Studio for quite a while. I think I’ve downloaded an illegal copy somehow when I was 14 or 15 years old, but I never really knew my way around the program or actually knew what I was doing.

Even though I got my first booking in 2011, I wanted to get better at music. So I tried to apply for a few art schools and audio engineering studies but I got refused everywhere. The most ridiculous reason for refusing me was because after a 5-minute chat, they decided for themselves that I wasn’t ''motivated enough''??? This actually led to a horrible period for me, I was obligated by law to go to school. So, I applied for a car mechanic study and dropped out after 2 months. Then I started working fulltime in some stupid logistics job to earn some money and tried again a year later to get approval for an audio education. This time I applied to a school in Eindhoven that taught Technical Event studies. In the first year I was really enjoying it but when the second year came around things went sideways again.

We had to do a 6-month internship for an event company. I discovered that this was not what I wanted. I wanted to work with audio, especially in a studio and doing recordings.

Eventually I made the decision to apply for Sound Education Nederland, this is an education course specialised in everything regarding audio engineering.

They taught me everything I know from scratch. They taught me the basics of song writing, mixing, mastering, arrangement and so on. They really tried to cover everything there is to get started with your own music career. I finished the whole course in 1 year.

I tried to make as many genres as I could during this period. I did some Drum & Bass, Lo-Fi HipHop, Bass EDM and lowkey some hardcore.

In 2018/2019 I had a Drum & Bass/Dubstep project. This was a fun time, there were some local gigs coming in and I had the pleasure to share the stage with some nice artists in the Drum & Bass scene.

2024.06

MDC Interview#61 " Høbie "