Sander Kleinenberg visits Tantra Nightclub in Calgary on October 24th, 2007 along with Brad Copeland. Advance tickets will soon be available at Ticketmaster, Hot Gossip, Play and Giant45.

It’s been fifteen years since Sander Kleinenberg took his tentative first steps as a professional maker of dancefloor beats, and in those fifteen years he’s covered plenty of ground. Growing up in the Netherlands, Sander’s ears were first tuned to the sounds of the underground by the likes of old-school electro-hip-hop pioneers Mantronix, American remix superstar Shep Pettibone and British beatmasters Depeche Mode. By 15, he was already DJing in clubs and bars in his home town of The Hague, and by the early 1990s, his original compositions had caught the attention of Strictly Rhythm, arguably the most important and influential dance label of the 1990s.

As the summer of 2007 winds down, Sander is adrift with friends, sharing a few days of privacy and reflection on his boat before he jets off to his next European gig. Despite the dreary Dutch weather that sees him wiggling into a raincoat as our conversation starts, Sander is enjoying himself. “I'm a bit of a yachtsman,” he confesses. “It's my moment of clarity - and it gives my life balance. We all need balance in our lives, and for me, its heading out in a boat and sticking my head in to the wind.”

We spend a few minutes discussing all things nautical, and Sander indicates that he’s been quite busy this summer, even for a globe-trotting DJ. He’s managed to get a lot accomplished over the previous few months, not the least of which is having put together his latest compilation CD, This is Sander Kleinenberg. It’s his third compilation for the seminal Renaissance label, and his first new retail mix in nearly two years. I ask Sander to talk a bit about how he selected the tracks he chose for the mix, and to explain his thinking behind the mix.

“Generally, I choose my tracks with the idea of them being relevant and current, and representing all that is hopefully fresh and interesting about this scene,” Sander explains. “As a DJ this is always how I've worked - by being versatile and relevant.” As a two-CD set, Sander’s aim was to create two different mixes – helpfully labeled ‘left’ and ‘right’ – with two different flows and structures. “There is a bit more in the left CD that is a bit more off the beaten path,” he explains. “The flow of the left CD is different from what I usually do, while the right CD is more what you'd expect from a traditional club set.”

As fans of his previous creative outputs are likely already aware, Sander Kleinenberg puts a lot of emphasis on transcending the “in sound of the moment”, presenting in his sets and releases a style of dance music that ages gracefully and provides lasting appeal. “I try and search for a timeless quality in the tracks that I select,” he says. “I’d rather put together a mix of good music, rather than a mix that expresses a certain point in time, musically speaking. If you do that, you risk being trendy, and once a trend has come and gone, most of the songs from that time die out and are forgotten. There are only a handful of tracks that are able to survive a trend and grow out to be more than a part of the trend they came from.” And how does Sander hope to see This is Sander Kleinenberg in ten years’ time? “Ten years from now when I take this CD out of the closet and dust it off, I'd hope it would still have relevance to me then, too.”

One of the ways in which Sander is making a name for himself is in his use of synchronised video content in his live shows. As one of the few top-tier international DJs to have wholly embraced video DJing – or VJing as its called by many – Sander is quick to extol the virtues of having a visual component to his music, and not shy about how few people seem to have chosen the same path. “I feel sometimes like I'm a lonely warrior in this field,” he laments. “There are a few people into it, but it's not like I'm surrounded with a group of mates of are doing the same thing.” It may have taken some time, but Sander’s video, he feels, is finally ready for prime time. “It's taken me a while to get to the point where I feel the content I'm working on is ready to be released, but it's slowly getting there. I should be ready for May or June next year for a DVD release with a lot of my own material, a lot of my own mixes, and video.”

As Sander sees it, the days of big name DJs surviving on the backs of other people’s records is coming to an end. “I believe that DJing in its traditional form, playing other peoples music and staying upfront, isn't as easy as it used to be. It's a lot harder to stay ahead of everyone else, because of the digital download revolution. Hot music is available to everybody now - you can be from Wisconsin, or Moscow, or the Himalayas, and have access to practically all of the same records that I have. I might have the odd two or three week lead in getting sent promos before they're released, but that lead used to be a year. I remember going to see Sasha and Digweed at Twilo, and the people going there all knew that the music that they were hearing would not be released for months. You'd see big 'guess the record' topics on message boards for six months. Those days are definitely over. Now we have the internet, where if a DJ has their set recorded and they happen to play that record, then someone can lift the song out of their set and put it on a website, and before you know it everybody's got it. The lead time of a record has shortened dramatically. I'm now playing a promo for two weeks.”

To Sander, the question was obvious. “How can I improve, how can I make my DJ sets memorable, and give my sets a unique, added value?” His lifelong interest in visuals, coupled with his desire to take his DJ sets to the next level and appeal to a newer generation of clubgoers, made in-club video an appealing place to explore. “I think our generation is the first that has grown up with video an everyday part of our lives, with MTV, with movies so widely available, with sixty television channels - to me video was a very natural step, a natural progression within the scene.”

Part of Sander’s argument for exploring club video is economic. “Ten years ago,” he explains, “it cost a tremendous amount of money just to put a professional five minute clip together, whereas now with a $2000 laptop you can do the wildest things - so that's obviously helped me in being able to bring video in. I guess it was a matter of the right place, the right time.”

To bring his video production skills up to scratch, Sander has teamed up with some of the industry’s best talent – most notably former Vengaboy Mark Pistoire and Olivier Sorenson (aka VJ Anyone), a groundbreaking London-based VJ who made a name for himself in recent years providing visuals for Tiësto, Goldie, Ritchie Hawtin and Darren Emerson. “I've teamed up with some great video artists over the past three years, and we've been able to put some amazing things together,” acknowledges Sander. “Creatively there is so much that can be done. I can record a vocalist and have the vocalist appear on the screen in my DJ sets, for example. You can almost turn a DJ into a one-man band - it just offers up so much more creative control.”

Nonetheless, Sander knows that it's not possible to put together a top-tier video display system in every nightclub in the world. “Unfortunately, I'm not the Rolling Stones," he says with a chuckle. “We do get the odd phone call saying 'the DJ booth is on the sixth floor of our club, so there's no way to get a video screen anywhere near you,' or something like that. I'd say about sixty or seventy percent of the clubs I play in are able to put together a video system to my specs. At first the people who were booking me had a bit of a hard time understanding just what it is I do, but now that I'm coming back to those same clubs for a second and a third time having laid a foundation, it's much easier - rather than have to explain everything, it's more like 'great, Sander is coming with his audiovisual show!' and they know exactly what to do.”

Digging a bit deeper, I ask Sander about how he prepares his video material, and just how he gets his synchronised video content onto the club's big screens. “I'd say twenty-five to thirty percent of the tracks that I play I've pre-programmed the audio and video ahead of time, matching the colour scheme and whatnot to the elements of the track. If the track has an organic feel to it, we'll have organic elements in the video, whereas if the track is more abstract, we'll use more abstract visual symbols. Once those tracks are put together, I play the track off a VDJ [DJ DVD player] just as I would play an audio CD on a CDJ.” For mixing, Sander prefers the use of a dedicated video assistant, rather than using a video mixer alongside the club's audio mixing hardware. “I work with a video jockey who controls what comes up on the screen - so whenever he gets a fixed signal from my end, he mixes that onscreen, and if I'm playing a normal audio CD, he comes in with his own live content and plays alongside me.”

Given the effort and energy he has put into advancing the use of video by club DJs, it seems only natural to ask Sander what advice he might offer up-and-coming club DJs looking to bring video into their own sets. “You can bypass the need for a separate VJ by pre-recording ten or twenty different moods on a DVD, and have them play on your DVJ, and whenever you feel like you need a certain mood, you can switch to that. If you'd like to get a bit more technical, you could pre-program twenty 130BPM click tracks, create video content synced to the click, and then mix the video content onto the screen, using the click to keep it synchronised.”

As one of the industry's club video pioneers, Sander has his ear to the ground regarding upcoming VJ technologies. “Very soon we're going to see integrated audio/video mixers specifically made for DJs,” he says. “I can't talk too much about the specifics, but the technology is quickly coming full-circle in terms of putting full control of video and images in the DJ's hands.”

So does Sander see it as inevitable that DJs of the future will be spinning video clips alongside their audio selections? “I'm not sure it's going to take over the world,” he surmises. “At the end of the day, video DJ players are not cheap. It still requires a lot of high-end equipment, and so I don’t think it’s something we're going to see in every bedroom DJ's setup. It's probably more something for professional DJs for now. In the United States, we're starting to see a lot of DJs touring with video equipment and playing video clips in their sets. It is a niche thing for now, but it gives me an edge for what I do. I think it will only become a DJ solution in the broader sense of the world when producers and record labels start releasing video with their music. When producers come to realise that creating music is done on the same creative wavelength as creating video - because I do believe you're using the same part of your brain - and their output becomes one format, a 'video track', that's where it becomes interesting. That's where artists will give their tracks more identity, and make them more memorable.”

As Sander sees it, the synthesis of audio and video also provides a path out of the current pressures placed on the underground music community as a result of file-sharing and music piracy. “I think by creating extra value, potentially it can be a solution for record labels and producers alike, to re-spark interest in buying singles and DVDs.” Here Sander's own label, Little Mountain Recordings, is leading the way, having released the industry's first DVD single for DJs as part of his recent single The Fruit.

Of course no tech-talk with a twenty-first century DJ would be complete without a bit of computer talk. I ask Sander about his computer platform of choice - Mac or PC? “My video content producer uses a PC, but I'm a Mac guy myself. I don't have any spiritual connection with Apple, but I just find Macs to be more stable.”

Too quickly, our conversation comes to a close. As we say our goodbyes, I ask Sander if we can expect to see his video shenanigans in action during his upcoming Calgary show. “Absolutely,” he says, confirming that, for the first time, Western Canadian clubgoers will be able to experience the full Sander Kleinenberg experience – and if the reviews of his recent shows are anything to go by, it will be an entertaining show indeed.