Sander Van Doorn

The Dutch house/trance producer wonders if the overly-commercial days of dance are coming to an end – and what that means for musicians

When Sander van Doorn was a small boy – maybe five or six years old – his father used to tell him stories. But there was something different about these stories because they had a soundtrack.

“My dad was a big Jean-Michel Jarre fan,” remembers van Doorn. “He used to love the Equinoxe album and, every week, he would put it on the record player and tell me stories that fitted with the music. When the music was high, the story was exciting; when it was low, the story was sad. He would even break the story into two halves so he could turn the record over.

“Not only did I enjoy the stories, I was also fascinated by the music. The strange sound of the synthesiser… songs that were very different to what I heard on the radio. There was so much emotion in the music. It allowed my imagination to roam free. I could see and hear all the things that my dad talked about in the stories.

“Looking back, I think I was already beginning to listen to music far more intensely than the average kid. Music really meant something to me. And that feeling has never really left me!”

It’s over three decades since Sander Ketelaars – aka, van Doorn – was sitting in his parents’ Eindhoven home, listening to Jarre’s ARP 2600. Today, he’s relaxing in his studio, surveying the canals of Amsterdam and looking back over a summer that’s taken him everywhere from Shanghai to Ibiza to Canada to… his back garden.

“I’m having a new studio built,” he explains. “Soundproofed, all the acoustics sorted, all my hardware ready to go. I feel like a kid who’s been given his own toy shop!”