DJ Niel

Born in 1979, Niel played the drums in the early years of his life. The first contact with house music came around 1990, when the first successful house tunes reached the charts in Holland. From that time on, he was instantly hooked on the straight electronic nature of the harder tracks made that time. Niel was fortunate to grow up in Rotterdam, where he had the change to witness the development of hardcore house in its first form. Although he wasn’t old enough to visit party’s, the local record stores and the city’s radioprogramme “Turbulentie” provided enough music and information to keep up to date with the latest developments. At the age of 13, Niel bought his first records and mixed them on tapes for his friends. During “the big hype” around commercial hardcore (‘95-’97), Niel joined the drive-inn show of a friend where he mainly played oldschool and commercial hardcore at small party’s and schoolparty’s. Hardcore became impopular a time later, which resulted in a great fallback in bookings. This gave Niel the opportunity to perfect his producing skills. After a year of hard work all his effort resulted in a recordcontract, but due to lack of good management, these tracks were never released. Still, this event had its good effects. Finally being acknowledged as a capable producer, Niel continued his work. This resulted in his first release at record company Noculan Music, on Coolman Specials 006, which contains the successful track “The sound from the deep”. Meanwhile, Niel finished his havo-education and started studying HBO music technology. The labelmanager of Coolman, DJ Rob, introduced upcoming Belgian DJ Kristof to Niel and they decided to produce together. At the end of 2002, Niel felt it was time to expand his influence and freedom in the music business by starting his own independent record label. The label is named Zero Tolerance records.