IJland Studio is located in the Eastern Docklands, a typical post-industrial urban area right at the IJ-lake. This is where the Dutch post-colonialist shipping company Royal Dutch Lloyd loaded and unloaded their ships with goods -such as cocoa from Brazil to Amsterdam, and a workforce in the form of migrants from Eastern Europe looking for a better future accross the Atlantic. These emigrants would stay in the main building (now The Lloyd Hotel), but wouldn’t just hop on a boat. The dirty travellers (read: valuable goods) needed to be washed and ‘quarantined’ for a few weeks in order to keep Brazil from strange virusses (read: to keep the workforce healthy). This was done in het Ontsmettingsgebouw (Quarantine Building), the same building where IJland Studio is now located.

What is now being used as the live room, people were working there butt off shoveling coal to heat the building. And Studio A, where musical recordings are fixed and freshened up, there used to be the laundry area. Come to think of it, not much has changed really…

1980 – SQUATTERS & PUNK ROCKERS

After the old shipyards were abandoned years of demise and the neglect of empty buildings after WWII came to an end when Amsterdam’s famous squatting scene inhabited the building. Amongst them being many punk rockers -a scene that remains to set foot in the city to this day, with great venues such as OT301, OCCII and De Nieuwe Anita-, it was no suprise that a few of them started to build a studio in the basement with materials from the Salvation Army, amongst them many old matrasses that still hide behind the walls. Starting of in 1985 as Studio Zwembad (Swimmingpool), due to famous Amsterdam water issues, the famous Dutch punk act Raggende Manne lead by Bob Fosko formed the epicentre of punk rock in the Netherlands. The water issue got tackled, the place re-named to IJland Studio, and when word got out of an amazing drum sound things quickly moved forward to being a professional studio.

1995 – PROFESSIONAL MUSIC RECORDING STUDIO

Owners Evert Kaatee (1993) and Remko Schouten (2005) came, estblishing the studio as a professional recording studio. By embracing the digital era whilst investing in good old analog attributes and sticking to recording mussic in a live setting, IJland Studio succesfully survived its way into the next decades. Years of punk, blues, indie and rock & roll resulted in the production of many albums, but also the desperate need of a paint job. In 2016, the construction of a large iso-room in the live room and a vocal booth in Studio A, upgraded the recording facilities drastically. A wooden floor, windows between rooms and see-through doors connecting four separate spaces all majorly enhanced the workflow, joy and sound.

In 2024 Tim Visser took over to continue the IJland Studio legacy and bringing it into the next era of music recording. A stronger focus on analog gear boosted the recording quality yet again and making it more interesting to record music as the joyful craft of sound sculpturing.  Embracing the DIY bedroom studio era, the studio now also focusses on hybrid productions between home and studio. Because who needs an engineer when you know how to operate a DAW, or why notjust record drums and vocals and continue your mix at home?

Next to the continuation of recording and producing albums and music of all sorts, adding a 16 channel recording facility to the live room -now also called Studio A-, makes it possible for producers to work by themselves in a setting that suits the modern era: like home, but without disturbing the neighbors and with awesome gear and acoustics.

Because everybody should be able to use IJland Studio, especially in times where an ever growing share of the revenue made by music is not supporting the ones actually making it.. It’s IJland Studio’s goal to counter that capitalist culture, because professional, joyful music production in a safe environment where there’s time enough for love, should be accesible to all!