Cinnaman: The Spice Flows

Holland has long been a bastion of high quality dance music. Now more than ever, with the underground house revival in full swing, labels like Creme Organization, Rush Hour and Clone command enormous respect. More often than not, though, it’s the older generation who attract the limelight – veteran DJs and label owners whose careers stretch back a decade or more. What, you may wonder, do Holland’s young turks look like? Well, they might look a little like Academy grad Cinnaman.

Even if the name Cinnaman isn’t immediately familiar, the fruits of his various labours may be. The Amsterdam-based Boselie has arguably had his greatest successes operating behind the scenes, whether helping put together the Beat Dimensions compilations for Rush Hour or running the hugely successful Colors night at Trouw. He can lay claim to a modest but growing catalogue of productions, too, including FlyLo-esque hip-hop and house with Tom Trago as Yuro & Trago, and a twitchy techno collaboration with Presk.

But it’s DJing that is Cinnaman’s bread and butter. Boselie’s sets are typically a slick, fast-moving amalgam of house, techno and new UK-indebted hybrids, spanning decades and tempos without shying away from a crowd-pleaser or two. In that respect he’s comparable with the triumvirate of British “pure” DJs who have come to prominence in recent years: Ben UFO, Jackmaster and Oneman. In fact – as well as hosting all three at Colors – Boselie seems to have received a degree of validation from his contemporaries, having played back-to-back with Jackmaster at fabric and appeared on Hessle Audio’s Rinse FM show.

Boselie, though – fittingly for someone so embedded in the Dutch scene – sees the origins of his style as lying closer to home. It was through Rednose Distrikt, the Dutch duo of maverick producer Aardvarck and Steven De Peven, that he was first exposed to the power of variety. “Rednose Distrikt, as DJs, were a big inspiration,” he says. “The diversity was just crazy. They didn't care about BPMs – they were just mixing on sound and vibes.” The duo were an early discovery, made after Boselie picked up DJing from his father while growing up in the town of Den Bosch, in the southern Netherlands.

The young Boselie was soon going to clubs, where he met and befriended Aardvarck, who was responsible for introducing him to the Rush Hour store in Amsterdam. “It was amazing how many good records they had,” he recalls. “I could dig for hours.” Boselie would go on to work for Rush Hour for five years, a period in which his omnivorous tastes became increasingly focussed on the burgeoning global beat scene spearheaded by the likes of Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke. That interest led, eventually, to the Beat Dimensions compilations, produced in collaboration with Spacek Sound System DJ Jay Scarlett.

“I was listening to a Spacek Sound System mix on Beta Radio, I think, and discovered that Jay Scarlett was DJing for them,” Boselie says. “I enjoyed the mix so much that I booked them for the first party I programmed for Rush Hour, so Morgan and Jay came over and stayed a few days in Amsterdam. We discovered that most of the stuff we were playing was unreleased. So Antal, the owner of Rush Hour, said, ‘Why don't you guys do a compilation?’”

Two Beat Dimensions compilations followed in 2007 and 2009, featuring a raft of future and current stars from across the globe, from HudMo and FlyLo to Aardvarck and Tom Trago, and helped to define a scene in its infancy. A third installment in the series was mooted, but after a few years Boselie and Scarlett had moved on to pastures new. “At some point we had the idea to do a [third volume],” Boselie says. “But we went different ways musically, the music changed a lot – and the music business too. I'm very proud of putting the [compilations] together, but at some point you need to move on and find something new that inspires you.”

That inspiration came in the form of house music. Boselie was running a party at Trouw called Viral Radio at the time – which he describes as specialising in “a mix between Beat Dimensions kind of stuff and dubstep” – but was losing interest in the music coming from those worlds. A new direction was supplied, once again, by a Spacek collaborator. “Mark Pritchard sent me some Roska tunes that pulled me back into house music and made me start this new night called Colors,” Boselie recounts. “After a few years I was back where I belonged, playing as diverse as I did before the Beat Dimensions period.”

The remit for Colors, founded in 2010 by Boselie and friends Volcmar Lammers and Lukas Nieuwenhuijsen, was “fresh blends of house and bass music.” It was an almost immediate success. “Our second night was almost sold out,” Boselie says. “Getting 600 people in a club in the middle of the summer is pretty special for Amsterdam.” The night has since become Amsterdam’s home-away-from-home for the cream of UK talent, booking the likes of Pearson Sound, Eclair Fifi and Mickey Pearce alongside local artists. Cinnaman, naturally, is a dependable presence on flyers, but he’s more than just an anonymous resident; his annual solo shows, in which he plays for six hours with no support, have become something of an attraction in their own right.

Cinnaman now hosts a regular Colors show on Amsterdam’s Redlight Radio, and the party is branching out with a growing number of festival appearances. All of which makes Colors and, by extension, Cinnaman, one of the most promising young entities in Amsterdam’s thriving scene. Boselie can’t see himself going anywhere soon. “I think the scene is really good [in Amsterdam],” he says. “Even people from outside are moving here to make music – Ben Westbeech just moved here and lives around the corner from my house. I’m really attached to this city. It’s small and I can do everything by bike. I have good friends here. Why would I leave? Maybe because of the weather. But that’s not reason enough for me.”

Header photo credit: Ali Mousavi