mixmag netherlands
VIEZE ASBAK
MAKING SPACE FOR THE WEIRD
There is something almost accidental about the rise of Vieze Asbak. Before the festival stages, the streaming numbers, and the endless viral clips, the project existed as an inside joke between friends. There was no carefully constructed artist identity, no long-term strategy and certainly no expectation that a producer named “Dirty Ashtray” would become one of the most recognizable names in Europe’s new wave of hard dance music.
That lack of calculation remains one of the defining characteristics of the project. While many artists spend years trying to engineer success, Vieze Asbak still speaks about his beginnings as if they happened to someone else.
“Vieze Asbak was never intended to be well known. When I started, I made songs that my friends and I could listen to at hangouts. They would often give me remixes and original ideas. At some point, I started putting these songs on Spotify so we could listen to them more easily, and it just blew up because people found it. I think my songs were very stream-friendly and fast-paced, perfect for house parties during Covid. I guess people also just enjoyed the weird songs I made during those times.”
The word “weird” comes up repeatedly throughout our conversation. Not as a marketing tool or a carefully manufactured aesthetic, but simply as the most honest description of how he approaches making music. In a dance music landscape that has often become increasingly polished and image-conscious, Vieze Asbak believes originality still depends on the willingness to ignore expectations.
“A lot of artists are too scared to really just put whatever they feel like out there, afraid of what the big crowd would think. But I get that you want to appeal to the big crowd. At some point, I also had to decide where my project was going. Maybe it was becoming too eclectic. Someone once told me that sometimes the most creative approach is to first let people get comfortable in a certain lane, then play with their expectations. It’s cool to be weird, especially in hard techno, where most feel like copies of each other.”
Irony has always been part of the Vieze Asbak universe. The name is absurd, the edits are exaggerated, and the productions often refuse to take themselves too seriously. Yet somewhere along the way, the audience stopped treating the project as a meme and began to embrace it as something much more genuine.
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AUTHOR: SERGIO NIÑO PHOTOGRAPHY: MAXWIJERS
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