- Bubbling's feverish musicality is best suited for one place: the headiest dance floor, in the hands of its Caribbean originators.
- One night at The Hague's Club Voltage in 1988, DJ Moortje, who had come to the Netherlands from the Caribbean island of Curaçao, accidentally played a 33rpm dancehall record too fast, at 45rpm. The mistake became music history. The crowd loved the song's quick pace and feverish energy, and a new genre, bubbling, was born. Throughout the '90s, bubbling became the hot sound in Dutch clubs and inspired organised dance competitions nationwide. Though it originated among musicians from Aruba, Suriname and Curaçao, the genre gained wide popularity in the Netherlands, particularly across the Latin and Afro-diasporic communities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague.
After its peak in the '90s, the style was eclipsed on dance floors by comparatively funkless Dutch house and remained mostly underground for the following 20 years. For a period in the late '00s, a young Dutch producer with Surinamese heritage named Guillermo Schuurman started producing and DJing bubbling music under the name De Schuurman. He came from a family of bubbling royalty, with several cousins DJing in the scene while his uncle, DJ Chippie, was one of the founding fathers of the genre. Schuurman had stopped producing and DJing for the best part of a decade when, in 2021, Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes released Bubbling Inside, a compilation of some of his best tracks. The release's success sparked a renaissance in Schuurman's career, and he has been touring busily ever since.
Now, the label has put together a second collection, Bubbling Forever, collating more tracks from Schuurman's archive alongside new productions. The latest look into his work offers infectious, high-energy club music made for a single purpose: making you sweat. His music bears all of the hallmarks of bubbling's core sonic signatures, from sped-up dancehall rhythms and brash melodies to clipped vocal loops, but his style is distinctly tougher. His stark production maintains a frenetic pace and tightly syncopated rhythms reminiscent of other styles in the global bass continuum, from Angolan kuduro to the shapeshifting sound of Latin American labels like TraTraTrax (for whom Schuurman remixed Bitter Babe & Nick León in 2022).
The compilation's default sonic palette is jittery. Syncopated drums stutter under looping alarm-like melodies that tear up and down the scale, creating a feverish intensity. The opening track, "Raw," is a clear statement of intent. Its melody is a siren which never sits still, constantly shifting in tone and timbre like the calls of an aviary of digital birds. While the melody of "Broejaa" writhes incessantly, its beat recalls the speed dembow of producers like Siu Mata & Amor Satyr (bubbling could be called a distant cousin of reggaeton and even jungle, as all these genres were born from localised mutations of reggae and dancehall). Where the synths aren't the centrepiece, vocal samples are clipped short and bark like excited dogs—like on "Kaboela Style," which condenses its martial drums and guttural vocal snips into a near-constant artillery.
The album isn't all maximum intensity, though. Tracks like "Fucked Up Industrie" slow the record's pace to a paranoid crawl, its beat echoing like reggaeton heard through the wall of a dungeon, while another siren-like melody oscillates ominously in the foreground. "Biennale Dakar" offers one of the album's best moments, softening the mood with dreamy synth work that sets up its melodies almost as a call and response, later interrupted by watery dub techno chords. The combination of its melancholy tone and gentle yet insistent rhythms would be right at home on Lisbon's Príncipe label.
Bubbling was always defined by its ability to draw on elements from a diverse array of popular genres, from trance to R&B to hip-hop, and some of Schuurman's best moments see him broadening his canvas to incorporate outside influences. The softer "Bubbling Meets Kaseko" includes Latin piano figures to joyous effect, while "Stylez Two" brings in a steel drum melody that more directly references the genre's Caribbean heritage. Schuurman also drafts in bubbling royalty DJ Chuckie for "Gangster Sht 2," which makes for one of the album's most dramatic moments, building with crashing cymbals and cheeky rap samples ("You think this is some gangster shit?") into a furious drop that unleashes a viscous wave of grimy bass pressure.
These compilations ought to remind listeners of the vital role of bubbling and Dutch Afro house more widely in the histories of Dutch electronic music, where they are often forgotten. While there has been a recurring narrative of bubbling being poised to enter the mainstream for good—from its '90s peak in Dutch clubs to adoption by big-room name DJs like Hardwell, Afrojack and Diplo to a 2011 compilation, Anti-G's Presents Kentjesz Beatsz, where the Nyege Nyege crew first heard the sound—the style seems best suited for one place only: the headiest dance floors, in the hands of its originators. Schuurman himself encapsulated bubbling's core message in one of his early tracks, "Nu Ga Je Dansen," whose name translates to, "now you're going to dance." It's not a suggestion—it's an order.
Lista de sequência de músicas01. Raw
02. Bounce (Exclusive Real 09 Bubbling)
03. Biennale Dakar
04. Bubbling Meets Kaseko
05. Stylez two
06. Scratchin
07. De Schuurman & DH Chuckie - Gangster Sht
08. Fucked Up Industrie
09. Kaboela Style
10. Ayaa
11. Broejaa
12. Fashion Week