The story of bubbling house: how a group of teenagers shaped a genre and never got their dues

The sound of one of the Netherlands’ only homegrown diasporic genres blew up clubs without ever troubling the mainstream. Now, thanks to the efforts of Nyege Nyege Tapes and longtime admirers of the genre, bubbling house pioneers including De Schuurman and Shaun D are finally getting the recognition they deserve.

In the early 2000s, when the internet still felt like it could be a force for good, a group of kids in the western Dutch cities of The Hague and Rotterdam spent their after-school hours pushing the limits of rudimentary music production programmes.

The sound they hashed out on the cracked DAWS mixed dancehall riddims with house kicks and aggressive synth loops. Growing up in the tight-knit diaspora communities formed by migrants from the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Antilles, these kids took samples from their parents’ dancehall records and mixed them with house and US hip-hop. The results of these teenage experiments spread across the Netherlands through an informal, digital ecosystem of MSN Messenger, torrent sharing and Dutch social media, making their way onto the dancefloor, where the tracks exploded in popularity. Bubbling house, as it was known, would shape not just the rise of the commercially successful genre Dutch house, but also see its DNA travel, via this offshoot, into the wilder excesses of EDM. But the teens behind the movement never got credit for what they started. 

It’s a tale as old as time: unsung producers, often from cities or regions distant from the established dance music hubs, develop a new sound immediately championed by the subcultures they serve and belong to. As their work gains force and momentum, they get lost in the blur of growth. It’s a story that’s even harder to reclaim when set against the backdrop of the notoriously ephemeral early days of the internet, where so much was lost in the Web 2.0 boom.

A new compilation celebrating the work of bubbling house pioneer Shaun D, released on Nyege Nyege Tapes, aims to correct the telling of electronic music history. From Bubbling to Dutch House is the latest release from a label that has done much to shine a light on bubbling and its adjacent sub-genres, following two albums by Shaun’s peer and friend, De Schuurman (2020’s Bubbling Inside and 2024’s Bubbling Forever). Like From Bubbling to Dutch House, those were compilations of tracks that, though never officially released, lit up the internet – and dancefloors – almost 20 years ago. 

Bubbling house emerged from bubbling – a sped-up, Dutch-honed variation of dancehall created by Curaçao-born DJ Moortje in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, bubbling had evolved in step with the popularity of dance battles; producers like Serginho Boogie added breaking rhythms to match pop-and-lock dance styles, where wild acrobatic breaks complemented complex footwork. By the 2000s, DJs like Coversquad, Chuckie, Chippie and Naffie introduced harder synth melodies over the original bubbling beat, giving the genre a hardstyle edge. In the hands of Shaun and his peers, bubbling house emerged as a hybrid genre, produced from collaborative teenage alchemy and defined by crudely chopped samples and towering drum fills that build to gravity-defying drops; an energetic call to arms for dancefloor abandon.

The emergence of first bubbling, then bubbling house, was a moment of release for these diaspora communities. Raziyah Heath, who DJs as Chinnamasta, is a researcher and curator. Though only born in 1999, she has performed with both Chuckie and De Schuurman, and recently created the sound journey for Bubbling Baby – an exhibition at Rotterdam’s Motel Mozaïque exploring the female presence in the scene (“most of the energy came from the dancers; if the girls were not dancing, you weren’t that good”) built around Sharine Rijsenburg’s short film of the same name. As the only Dutch-Caribbean sound created in the Netherlands, it hit the ground running. “It definitely meant a lot to the community,” she explains. “When it started, it was in a similar timeframe as hardstyle, which was taking over mostly in white communities. To have something with a similar impact, but with rhythms and vocals more related to the Black Caribbean community, was a significant moment where people felt like, ‘OK, I can take up space in this sound.’ It was something to relate to.”

The relationship between bubbling, bubbling house and Dutch house is a close one. Tight familial links played a significant role in the evolution from one genre to the next, speaking to its distinct localism and roots in the multicultural urban areas of the west Netherlands. De Schuurman is Chippie’s nephew, while Shaun is related to DJ Moortje, through his cousin Darren (a.k.a. Master-D), another important bubbling house exponent. These blood ties have influenced the durability of bubbling and its offshoots, as well as their ability to adapt and evolve across different generations, with shared references and production knowledge. “Being family meant there was more trust between us,” recalls Shaun, who honed his artistry by mixing with Darren during family hangouts. 

Using Windows 95, a Logitech desktop microphone and an early DAW called FastTracker, Shaun spent his adolescence cutting up synth samples to make his melodies and layering different percussive tracks into a cryptic, matrix-style programme. “I was just having fun and wanted to share my music,” he says. “I was 15, I didn’t know what I was doing.”

As a second-generation Surinamese kid, Shaun’s crossover sound resonated with diaspora communities in the western Netherlands looking to both whine (‘schuren’ in Dutch) and rave. Shaun would burn his tracks on CDs to sneak into Rotterdam clubs like HVO and Hollywood, both key hubs for Afro-Dutch and migrant communities. Resident DJs like Mad House were early fans of his work and encouraged the teenage Shaun to bring in new music. In 2007, Shaun wrote his breakthrough track, Pull Up. Its component parts are simple – a siren wail, a garish, slippery synth and a skeletal bubbling riddim – but its effect is deadly. “Everything was sample-based, there were no VSTs [virtual instruments],” Shaun recalls. “I’d cut melody, take a kick from a trance track, a snare from the Murder She Wrote riddim, and play around with the notes.” Shaun uploaded Pull Up to Dutch social media pages Hyves and PartyPeople, where it clocked over a million streams – an unprecedented viral hit during social media infancy. 

Yet, despite its word-of-mouth success, bubbling house remained too niche for mainstream labels to notice, limiting its growth. Shaun, who released tracks for free online, never received wider recognition. “These tracks are some of the biggest influences of Dutch house and nobody knows it,” says Rajiv Münch, a.k.a. moombahton innovator Munchi, a longtime advocate of bubbling house. “Pull Up was one of the biggest tracks. You heard it in all the clubs.” 

Fittingly, today’s bubbling house comeback began on the dancefloor, after De Schuurman started dropping early tracks into his sets: “I was touring a few years ago, and began playing all those old tracks – people were just going nuts,” De Schuurman says. Sensing a growing interest, he begged Shaun to release his old work. But Shaun was unconvinced. “He couldn’t grasp it, I was shouting on the phone, getting mad!” he laughs. It took the release of De Schuurman’s albums – and some persistent nudging from Münch – to get Shaun on board. Now 37, and after two decades producing for Dutch rap and R&B artists, he’s had to process how to value his early artistry. Listening back, he still can’t help but add disclaimers: “I didn’t level the volumes right, the melody is lacking,” he reflects. “I didn’t have a compressor. I was just putting a kick, melody and drums together.”

But this rawness is part of the power. Shaun’s brazenly youthful approach is left intact on From Bubbling to Dutch House, which includes some of his earliest efforts. Bouncy steel drum ode Magic Stick, throbbing club starter Danger and the high-energy trance track Space Tune – all dating from 2003-2004 – were made when he was only 15. 

The sense of freedom that defined the spirit of those early bubbling and bubbling house tracks, and the parties they were played at, also attracted negative attention. Primarily attracting a Black and brown crowd from Dutch migrant communities, bubbling was targeted for encouraging violence and became ostracised among the wider Dutch public. “Bubbling got a bad name,” Shaun says. “I remember I wanted to book a younger DJ for a bubbling party, but he said he didn’t even want to get associated with it.” By the mid-2010s, bubbling house was rapidly fading from setlists and the public consciousness. It eventually got imitated, diluted and rebranded; gobbled up into Dutch house and the EDM machinery. 

Shaun is hesitant to say outright that racial prejudice has played a role in bubbling house’s erasure. “You could say that, but there were a number of factors,” he says, citing the dawn of smartphones and the rise of Dutch-language rap changing the fabric of Dutch youth culture. Münch, however, has a less forgiving understanding of how events played out: “Dutch house completely ripped it off. It’s not Dutch, it’s fucking Surinamese and Antillean,” he says, livid. “It’s convenient: first it’s shunned, but when it gets popular? Oh, now it’s Dutch.”

As Shaun, De Schuurman and Master-D never built an official catalogue of tracks, their work was left exposed to imitators. A prime example occurred in 2012, when Diplo – arguably the worst offender when it comes to musical appropriation – dropped the Azealia Banks-featuring track, Fuck Up the Fun, in 2012. People were quick to note that the beat was apparently entirely ripped from Mad Drumz, a 2009 track by Master-D – Shaun’s cousin. After getting called out by bubbling house fans, Diplo claimed it was a collaboration. “That’s not the real story,” Darren clarifies. “He stole it first. We wanted to make a case against him, but he was too big.” Shaken by the experience, Darren retired the Master-D moniker. He’s since built a successful career as a platinum-selling producer, primarily working with Dutch rap and R&B artists. 

Shaun similarly tried to branch into different genres, but with less success. He made several EDM tracks but was blanked by labels, and they remain unpublished. He dabbled in producing beats for Dutch rappers, gaining some commercial success with hits like 2018’s Wasmachine, but his career never regained the momentum of his bubbling house days. 

“You had all these kids who could have made a career of bubbling house, but they never got the opportunity, as it was seen as something throwaway,” Münch says. “Then you had all these assholes who just ripped it off.”

De Schuurman takes a more introspective tone: “[It] was for us to take heed that the world was paying attention to this small genre from Holland, but we were blind,” he reflects. “Bubbling music was for urban diasporic communities in small clubs in the Netherlands. We never saw it as big money music. We were too inexperienced and insecure.”

Thanks to the encouragement of Nyege Nyege Tapes, bubbling house diehards and younger clubbers just discovering the sound, as well as exhibitions and films like Bubbling Baby digging deep into the past, its legacy seems more secure than ever. It may even have unleashed a brand-new offshoot, thinks Raziyah Heath. “It’s actually like a whole new genre. I think bubbling has made those producers comfortable to incorporate some of their more traditional sounds with an electronic undertone, which is still a lot of snares and drums, but more in a pattern of the traditional Surinamese music called kaseko and kawina. There’s no name for it yet!”

As Shaun gears up for a busy summer, featuring a joint set with De Schuurman at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival, there’s a sense that he still can’t grasp that he is finally gaining the recognition he so sorely deserved. True to the collaborative nature that defines bubbling music in all its eras and evolutions, Shaun loyally credits his friends and family for the chance he’s getting again today. 

“It was Munchi and De Schuurman who told me: ‘You gotta know who you are,’” he says, with a renewed sense of conviction. “You’re the one who made these tracks – and people really loved them.”