The New Year festivities carried on into 2015 with Trouw Closing Weekender starting its 35 hour marathon on January 2nd, 2015. To celebrate this monumental occasion, Trouw played it extremely cool. Tickets at the door, everybody stands in line and - according to popular myth - even the DJs had to buy tickets.
We enter the club early and the atmosphere has an electric charge of scene kids congratulating each other on getting past the door and for being part of something that will go down in club history. Trouw regular Elias Mazian is on the decks in the main room, playing a happy and heartfelt set to ease us into the night ahead.
We quickly find ourselves in the smallest, darkest and sweatiest room - De Natte Cel - what used to be the shower room of a newspaper priting factory now serves as a secret 3rd room, seldom open in Trouw's six years of existence. People are standing on the shower benches, crowding around Beesmunt Soundsystem who lay down some dirty house basement beats.
As we prowl our way back to the main room, I have eyes for one man only. Recondite is laying it down for us with his sinister, hypnotizing, yet oh so minimalistic beats. It takes a true master to create the depth that runs through his music with only the minimum of sounds.
Back downstairs Olaf Boswijk, founder of club Trouw puts on an appropriately happy and eclectic set. We then rush to catch the last of Sandrien – one of the few female DJs that has held her own in club Trouw. As she rounds off her set, the room goes quiet - and then tummultuous applause. The end of an era.
We soon reach the end of the first part of the timetable and everyone is left wondering – what's next? Casually, a staff member puts up an A4 piece of paper with the second stage of DJ announcements. No online promotion, just a weathered looking paper that holds the map to our Trouw-athon. The rumours are true - Nicolas Jaar is on the bill, as well as Âme, Henrik Schwarz and Trouw resident Tom Trago. My night is complete – complete with Seth Troxler running around in his underwear who later puts down a dark and groovy set in De Natte Cel.
As the hours trickle by, an intense, melancholic feeling of goodbye hangs in the air, but for the meantime everybody ignores the dark cloud with a smile on their face. Friends come and go, we laugh, we cry, we dance, and for us it's time to say goodbye. Appropriately it's Nicolas Jaar, master of nostalgia, behind the decks, and so I raise my drink to the crowd, the DJ and the club. Leaving feels like leaving behind a warm embracing hug. Remarkable for an industrial looking club like Trouw.
Olaf Boswijk suitably plays the last set of the marathon and from home I listen to the livestream of the last track ever played in Trouw – This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads.
WORDS | Maya Dupont
