“Pressing play on the last track of my set really left me feeling like I was closing a big chapter of my life.” Job Veerman, the Dutch DJ and producer better known as Identified Patient, is telling me about a particularly special gig at the start of this year during the last-ever party at much-loved Amsterdam venue De School. Having drawn for Tim Reaper’s unruly jungle techno banger “Something Unreal” as his final selection––“the moment already had this really emotional and romantic quality to it, so it felt right to finish with something heavy,” Veerman says––the set closed the curtain on a long-standing connection with the club that began when he first played there in February 2018.
Veerman’s sound has undergone significant evolution since that first booking, and the seven that followed that same year as he settled in as a regular at the club. Initially establishing himself as a proponent of sludgy, lo-fi, chugging techno and electro via releases for Dutch labels Common Thread and Pinkman, more recent records for Dekmantel and Nerve Collect, the label he founded together with friend and producer Gamma Intel last year, has seen him push his sound into decidedly more broken territory, folding in elements of halftime drum & bass, IDM and UK bass music.
It’s a development that has been fueled, in part, by Veerman’s firm desire not to play it safe and cover the same ground over and over. “Something I really hate in the studio is just making too many tracks that sound the same,” he says, when we get on to discussing his more recent output. “Of course, there are certain elements that will carry over, but I get bored quite easily, so I want to come out of the studio feeling excited by whatever I’m working on. If you’re not excited by what you’re doing, it gets harder to go back in there the next day and keep working. It feels more like a job.”
A similar train of thought applies to Veerman’s DJ sets, another area that has continually evolved since he began to build a name for himself in The Netherlands’ electronic music scene, and more widely. Though he emphasises that it’s best to maintain some form of “steady line” through a set––avoiding the kind of excessive, jarring changes of pace that can potentially lose dancers in a club––he always ultimately wants to be surprised on a dance floor. That key principle has seen him refine an approach to DJing characterised by playing all manner of styles and tempos, with a standard set taking in punishing drum tracks; bass-driven breakbeat bangers; gunfinger-inducing jungle cuts; driving Latin club music; and various hypnotic strains of techno; among other sounds.
That inclination for eclecticism has taken a number of years to truly hone, a happy side-effect of his hectic touring schedule. “In 2020, just before the pandemic set in, I was starting to become way more confident with DJing, and having a really good time playing in clubs,” Veerman says. “At that time, I really felt like I knew what I liked, and that meant I could more easily connect the lines between everything. The more you play, the more you know how you want to present things, and you become less afraid to fuck things up. I actually feel more like a DJ than a producer right now, because I can be really happy with a set and feel like I have more control over it. With producing, I’m still like, ‘Fuck, give me five more years because I really need it.’ I still feel like I have so much to learn when it comes to producing.”
As an obsessive of the aqueous electro tones of Drexciya through his teenage years and into his twenties, Veerman first settled into making music with little expectation, simply treating it as a creative outlet while doing his day job of selling lottery tickets for the Staatsloterij, the state lottery of The Netherlands. “While I was working, in another tab, I had this forum open called synthforum.nl,” he says. “I would scroll through it obsessively and just pick up whatever information I could. People like Legowelt were posting on there and responding to questions, so you could get some real good advice.” Taking in all the information he could, he set about building an arsenal of gear––“you end up buying a lot of stupid shit that you realise you don’t need, but that’s all part of the learning curve”––using it to recreate sounds from some of his favourite records and producers, before eventually plucking up the courage to upload one of his productions to SoundCloud and share the link to the forum.
“I got a message from this guy from Rotterdam [Common Thread founder Mitchell Goor] asking me if he could release it, and put together a full record,” Veerman recalls. “I didn’t even know you had to make a pre-master for the tracks at that point, so I just gave him some music unmixed. The label took care of it, and crushed the fuck out of it, but that became the character of the EP.” The Female Medicinal College Of Pennsylvania, released in 2016, was a significant success, its tracks landing in the DJ sets of the likes of Lena Willikens, the late Silent Servant and, more recently, Marcel Dettmann.
Things snowballed from there, as Marsman, the Rotterdam-based DJ and producer behind the label Pinkman, invited Veerman to put together a further release––Weeshuis Der Verloren Zielen dropped in May 2017, followed later that year by Aborting Your Dreams. “I did a Boiler Room in 2018, and then things started going much faster than I expected,” Veerman says. “I had never thought specifically about trying to have a music career. The name Identified Patient didn’t even have too much thought behind it when I first put my records out. It was just a reference to the black sheep of a family, because I come from a bigger family. There wasn’t a huge amount of intention behind it all.”
A link-up with Dekmantel felt like a logical next step, with Veerman playing the Dutch electronic music institution’s flagship festival for the first time in 2018. “I’d been going to their parties since day one, before the festival became what it is now,” he says. “I remember smuggling my little bottle of vodka into the second edition of the festival, and just getting fucked on the terrain, seeing all of my heroes play, so to get the chance to become a part of that was really dope.” Two records for the Dekmantel label’s UFO series––2019’s Signals In Snakes and 2020’s Nerve Deposit––followed. It’s on the latter release where he truly began to flex his proclivity for a more wide-ranging sound, with elements of “Low Kust” drawing on the darker side of dubstep, and “Secretary” centring around a headfuck-inducing switch-up of halftime and doubletime jungle drums.
That approach carried through to the murky, sound system-rattling Elevator Music For Headbangers, released last year. Much of it was produced during the lay-off in gigs for Veerman caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a period which, even if unwelcome, he refused to let go to waste. “I had so much time on my hands, so I spent lots of time in the studio,” he says. “It’s quite fucked-up, but I learnt so much in that time, because I had no stress about rushing to finish things or balance them with DJ gigs. There was some comfort in all of that emptiness, and I think I elevated my sound a lot in those two years or so because I had so much freedom just to work on music.”
Elevator Music For Headbangers was the first release on Nerve Collect, which Veerman and Gamma Intel, real name Laurens van de Werken, initially launched as a means to get their own music out to the world, having each finished work on a new EP. They had known each other for some years before truly striking up a friendship––van de Werken was the brother of Veerman’s best friend growing up––but the two properly hit it off many years ago having realised they were both making music with “a similar vision and aesthetic,” as Veerman puts it.
Having each put out records to launch the label, Nerve Collect has gone on to release killer EPs from Dutch duo Bastian Benjamin & French II, and New York-based bass music producer Doctor Jeep. The latter came about after Veerman and van de Werken played back-to-back at Dekmantel Selectors in 2022. “We were both playing Doctor Jeep tunes that he had sent to us,” he recalls. “When we started the label, we had a list of current artists that we like whose music we would want to release, and Doctor Jeep’s name was on both of our lists. Laurens had already connected with him from back in the day, and they had been exchanging music for a while, so it all came together very easily.”
Next up is a record from another Amsterdam-based producer Teqmun. Worms Still Have To Eat The Dirt is a bonkers trip through grimy IDM and dizzying breakbeats (with additional remixes from TSVI and Ma Sha) that further establishes Nerve Collect as an investigate-on-sight label. “It’s nice to support the Dutch scene [through Teqmun and Bastian Benjamin & French II’s releases], and know you’re putting music out from people who have a good heart and are really invested in the local scene,” Veerman says. After getting his break with the support of Dutch labels such as Common Thread and Pinkman, it seems he’s only too happy to pay that favour forward.
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