From the Ground Up
An earwitness account of the electronic dance music revolution on Belgian dancefloors from 1984 to the mid nineties.
By Captain Crash
If you actually wanted to lose yourself on the dancefloor before 1984, you know, moving until your mind goes blank and you're just operating on instinct, you basically had ... no real options. Either you ended up in clubs playing Barry White mixed with slow jams like “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” or in new wave venues where the music was marginally better but the main thing was looking cool, not dancing your head off.
Everything began to shift in 1984, the year Prince released Purple Rain. But while the world was captivated by his sound, Belgian club DJs were charting a different course, introducing a new style that would soon reshape dance floors across Europe. When the club owner left for a bathroom break or a short rest, they would suddenly drop heavy psychedelic rock tracks, hypnotic Section 25 beats, or other records with a mesmerizing rhythm that pushed you to switch off your mind and let your feet take over. DJs started digging through crates for these trance-like grooves. Obscure records were sometimes played at 33 RPM instead of the normal 45 RPM, making the sound stranger, more exotic, more forward-moving.
But after half an hour of musical experimentation they switched back to Barry White again, because the club owner feared the new sound would drive away regular customers and attract the wrong crowd.
The real breakthrough came in 1985 when the owner of the new Boccaccio club near Ghent, Belgium, decided to fully commit on Sunday nights. At midnight it started: DJ Olivier Pieters opened with “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins, lasers turned on (still new at the time), and the crowd reacted intensely to the new style of music. It felt like a giant wave hitting the dancefloor, carrying everyone into a unified ecstasy.
The tracks DJs played up to that point were mostly obscure recycled material from different genres and eras, but soon music from Detroit and Chicago was added, forming new styles built around the same principle: repetitive beats aimed at instinct rather than analysis. Music was no longer something you listened to with your head.
Of course the music press dismissed it. Electronic dance music? Just a passing hype, they said.
By 1988, Belgium already had several clubs fully dedicated to electronic music. Boccaccio drew people from everywhere: France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany. Partygoers traveled long distances just for this new sound. Weekends ran from Friday straight through to Tuesday evening. Car convoys moved from club to club, when one closed, another opened. In the UK, the acid rave scene took shape. In Germany, the Love Parade was launched, and the Mayday festival, one of the first major raves on the mainstream circuit, became a key event.
By 1994, the first real subgenres began to form: jungle techno, Goa, and others. That is where this collection ends.
In total, there are 476 tracks in 16 crates.
I start with music from before 1986, which I called “Roots of electronics.” There is no Kraftwerk or Vangelis, only the tracks played by Belgian DJs on dancefloors.
Next are early releases, newly created or specially made tracks for this emerging scene, followed by early US releases from Chicago and Detroit.
In 1988, Belgian New Beat exploded onto the scene, followed by releases from the UK, the US, and other countries. Each country still had its own sound at that time.
By 1990 the scene had matured and techno was established. From 1992 onwards a more unified sound emerged. Releases from different countries began to converge, a precursor to the next phase where distinct genres in electronic music started to rise, each with its own party culture and differentiated sound.
After that, the founding clubs declined, marking the start of a flourishing underground party scene, long before music conglomerates like Live Nation became involved and long before the rise of the superstar DJ and commercial electronic music events. But that's for another collection.
Vol 1. Roots of Electronic - Belgium and France
