When we get on Skype to conduct this interview in mid-May, it's already been a few weeks since Marcelle van Hoof had sent over her mix for our Groove podcast, the 300th in the series. She cannot remember what songs she used for it, she says. It is a pretty blunt admission to make, the kind you wouldn't expect to come from a DJ. But van Hoof simply is not like other DJs. The fact that she does not remember which tracks she used for the mix attests to that, because it reflects how she plays when behind the decks, faced by an audience: spontaneous yet decisive, never looking back.
It is precisely this approach that also characterises her work as a producer. The tracks she has been putting out for roughly five years are written on the fly, never fully polished, documents of a certain time or state of mind rather than products of a laborious process. Her newest album, Explain the Food, bitte, is the third under her DJ Marcelle/Another Nice Mess moniker, following up on 2019 and 2020's One Place for the First Time and Saturate the Market, Now!, respectively. Her own music, she points out before our interview, is something that she'd rather talk about than just "saying the same things all over again that I have said a hundred times already." Half of what you hear in her DJ sets these days, she adds, is her own productions anyway.
Which again means that there's no avoiding that subject. Though of course also a conversation with van Hoof is as full of twists and turns as her mix for our Groove podcast - a continuous flow that is never "safe and predictable" at all.
That's impossible to say. At the end of the 1970s, I bought all these punk records and wanted to share them with people. Most people didn't have a clue about exciting new music. That means I was DJing already when I was still in school. It's always tricky to answer all these questions about your first this or that, because you grow into it. I started doing radio shows when I was about 18 years old and played here or there, but of course the club scene at the end of the 70s - you cannot compare that with today's. I was playing my latest punk records mixed with dub or anything else that I fancied. I think the red thread running through all of this is that I am always quick at discovering new sounds. I was probably one of the first DJs in the Netherlands to play dubstep. Music for me should move forward and be interesting. It's not about a format, but about an idea of what music is, and about pushing the boundaries of what music or what a DJ set is. So I always wanted to share with other people: "Listen to this, it is fantastic! And if you mix it with something else, it becomes something else altogether." And that's what I have been doing all my life. Today, it is my profession, but at the end of the 70s, there was no club scene to speak of and I just played after a gig by The Fall or whatever. I have never wanted to be an entertainer, giving people what they want, but be like: "Oh, hey, you've never heard of Lee 'Scratch' Perry or Cabaret Voltaire and that is also great!" And then I would mix it together with something completely different, to make the individual piece sound better. That's my idea behind it, to not make it too one-dimensional, because music should be an adventure. That's what all those post-punk bands told me: there are no rules. This mentality is the red thread that runs through my musical life. I do not stick to the music style, but the idea. Because I think you should always play the latest music, just as if you read today's paper. Of course it can be interesting to read a newspaper from ten years ago; I am interested in history, but when I am performing it should be contemporary. This whole house is like a library of underground music from the past 40 years. But I don't like it when music becomes safe and predictable and almost by definition when something has become history, it becomes safe in a way. When I go back to the music of my youth ... I am not answering your question anymore... (laughs)