Junkie XL: Digital Addiction
Few would willingly take the name “Junkie,” but after spending more than 18 hours a day in an Amsterdam basement mainlining MIDI and sucking down samples in a binge of creativity, Tom Holkenborg decided to embrace it. He became Junkie XL, one of the world’s foremost electronic music producers and remixers, a powerhouse who churns out tracks for the dance floor, movies, television, and video games. He’s the only artist who’s been trusted to remix an Elvis song and the only producer to be given the chance to remix the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” He has also released four albums and his music has conquered the pop charts in 24 countries.
Holkenberg’s electronic music addiction is taking a new form. He’s now spending more time scoring motion pictures and video games. Junkie XL tunes can be heard in “Blade,” “Resident Evil,” “Matrix,” “Domino,” “Team America,” “Kingdom of Heaven,” and many video games. “I feel that movies, commercials, and video games are the new radio for electronic music,” he says. “I’ve made music for commercials that aired during the Super Bowl and the Oscars. Millions of people who would never go to a Junkie XL show or buy a Junkie XL album heard it. That’s beautiful.”
But Holkenborg hasn’t abandoned his die-hard fans. His latest LP, “Today,” is a collection of free-flowing tracks fueled by melodic guitar riffs and tight electronic beats. It’s a back-to-basics project that pays homage to some of Holkenberg’s biggest influences — New Order, U2, Depeche Mode, and Peter Gabriel. “It’s pretty much where I stand right now in my musical development,” he says. “That’s why it’s called ‘Today.’”
Becoming a Junkie
They say that talent runs in families. Holkenborg is no exception to this rule. The Holland native was steeped in music from the very beginning. His mother taught violin at a music school and his father was an accomplished musician and a DJ of sorts. “My dad was one of the very first DJs in Holland in the ’50s,” he says. “He cruised around on an old moped, going to parties and playing music.”
Holkenberg got a set of drums when he was eight. By the time he was 13, he was playing guitar and drums in local bands. When he was 16, he landed a job at a local music shop — partly to make some cash, but mostly to gain access to expensive synthesizers and samplers. “That was in ’85 and ’86, right about the time the first Atari came out,” he says. “It was possible to do music with the Commodore and Yamaha had a music computer that you could do all kinds of stuff with.”
In the late ’80s, Holkenberg formed a band called “Nerve.” “It was industrial, it was organic — it was based on hard beats, really heavy guitars, and aggressive vocals,” he says. Appearing in the same circles as Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Al Jorgenson, Ministry, Front 242, and Front Line Assembly, Nerve fused driving guitar riffs with emerging electronic music technology.
The band didn’t storm the pop charts, but it did get noticed. “I mixed electronic sounds with guitars in such a way that got a lot of bands interested in what I was doing,” says Holkenborg. “That’s how my production career started. That’s how I began to work with metal bands like Fear Factory, Soul Fly, and Sepultra — million-seller bands.”
That’s also how Holkenborg got hooked, working feverishly in his Amsterdam basement studio, mixing song after song using early Roland samplers and sequencing software like Cubase and Pro 24. But the endless days in his subterranean studio fried his nerves, strung out his creativity until it was ready to snap. In 1995 Holkenborg collapsed. “I couldn’t deal with it anymore,” he says. “I took a break for a half a year and that’s when I realized that I needed to do my own stuff. That’s when I started Junkie XL.”
Expanding Limits
The first Junkie XL album, “Saturday Night Teenage Kick,” hit store shelves in 1997. The synthesis of rock and syncopated electronic break beats secured Holkenberg’s seat among electronica’s greats. He toured with Prodigy, hitting major rock festivals like Fuji Rock and Roskilde. In 2000, he followed the hit album with “Big Sounds of the Drags,” a release that played a major role in the emerging rave scene in the United States.
Then Junkie XL exploded. In 2002, Holkenberg was asked to remix Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation” for a Nike World Cup commercial. Millions saw the commercial and the song entered the pop charts in more than 24 countries around the world. Junkie XL nearly became a household name. He used the success to break into movies, crafting tracks for “Matrix,” “Resident Evil,” and “Blade.”
His next album, “Radio JXL: A Broadcast from the Computer Hell Cabin,” was an homage to his heroes. “It was a big project,” he says. “There were two albums — one was called ‘3 a.m.’ and the other was called ‘3 p.m.,’ my vision of day radio and night radio. There were two more albums on the website — ‘7 a.m.’ and ‘7 p.m.’ It was about 240 minutes of music made over two or three years.” The album featured Solomon Burke, Peter Tosh, Chuck D, Dave Gahan, Robert Smith, and others.
Holkenberg made the album using Akai and Ensonic samplers and Roland, Korg, and Electroharmonics synths. He wove everything together with Cubase running on a Mac. “I’m not a computer technician,” he says. “I just want something that works. I want to go to a store, buy a computer, install my stuff and go for it.” Now Holkenborg runs Logic Pro and Pro Tools in a studio that’s crammed with Power Macs. “I don’t know much about computers,” he says. “That’s why I used to call my studio a computer hell. But now, with Apple, life is just easier. Macs just work.”
