Bonzai Records: Belgium's Answer To Dutch/German Trance

Bonzai Records was founded in Antwerp in 1992 by Fly Records owners and quickly became the umbrella under which Belgium's answer to Dutch and German trance took shape. If Black Hole (Netherlands) and MFS (Germany) represented the melodic, breakdown-heavy wing of classic trance, Bonzai represented its harder, faster, more rhythm-driven counterpart — records built for the specific mid-tempo hardness that Belgian clubs like Illusion and Cherry Moon were already known for from their new-beat and Belgian techno years.

The label's flagship artist is Mike Dierickx — who records under M.I.K.E., Push, DJ Ghost and half a dozen other names. His 'Universal Nation' (1998), released on Bonzai after being written in a single Wednesday afternoon as a proposed B-side to 'Prisma', is the record that put the label on international rotation. It licensed to Positiva in the UK, ID&T in the Netherlands and Kontor in Germany, and became a peak-time staple at Gatecrasher and Cream without ever quite fitting the Dutch/German uplifting template — the Push sound is faster (140+ BPM), harder-edged and more rhythmically insistent.

Bonzai's other flagship strand was progressive: the Bonzai Trance Progressive sub-label released Velvet Girl's 'Summertime' (2000) and multiple Airwave records in the early 2000s, working an audibly warmer, more melodic side of the family. Between the two — Push at 140+ BPM peak-time hardness, Airwave and Velvet Girl at 132–136 BPM progressive warmth — Bonzai's classic-era catalogue functions as a snapshot of what Belgian trance actually sounded like when it was neither borrowing from Rotterdam nor apologising for it.

The label's commercial peak came around 2001–2003. It never had a single global mega-brand moment on the scale of Black Hole or Anjunabeats, and by the mid-2000s the main label had wound down (Bonzai Progressive continues to release records to this day). But listen to Push, Yves Deruyter, Airwave, M.I.K.E. and Velvet Girl back to back and you get a coherent, geographically-specific take on classic trance that the Dutch/German canon consistently under-represents. If you have only ever heard Ferry Corsten and Paul van Dyk, Bonzai is the missing side of the family. Belgium's position in this history is frequently skipped, and skipping it makes the transition from early-nineties hardcore to late-nineties trance look far more abrupt than it was. Belgian dance music in the late eighties and early nineties had already produced new beat and a substantial hardcore and rave industry, complete with pressing plants, distribution and a domestic club circuit. When trance arrived, the country had the infrastructure to move on it immediately.

What distinguished the Belgian output was tempo and attitude. Where the Dutch and German producers were moving toward melodic uplifting material in the 138–142 range, the Bonzai catalogue leaned harder and faster, with more emphasis on the acid lineage the genre had inherited from Frankfurt and less on the string pads and choir textures that would define the commercial peak. The result reads as a parallel development rather than a derivative one: recognisably trance, arrived at from a different direction.

The label's operating model was volume. Bonzai and its network of sub-labels released at a rate that would be unmanageable for a modern imprint, with a relatively small pool of producers recording under a large number of aliases. That approach has an obvious downside — the catalogue is uneven, and a fair proportion of it is functional club material rather than anything anyone would call canonical — but it also meant the label was constantly testing ideas in public, and the strong records that emerged did so from genuine iteration rather than careful A&R.

The alias culture also makes the catalogue genuinely difficult to navigate, which is a real reason the Belgian contribution is under-recognised. Where the Dutch scene organised itself around a small number of legible star producers, the Belgian one dispersed its output across dozens of project names. That is excellent for a label filling a release schedule and terrible for building a historical reputation, because there is no single figure for a retrospective to be built around.

Its influence shows up most clearly in the harder strands. Hard trance, the faster end of the uplifting spectrum, and a good deal of what became tech-trance owe more to the Belgian template than to the Dutch one. The Who's Afraid Of 138?! sensibility — the insistence that trance should not slow down to meet the wider market — is philosophically closer to Bonzai's position in 1996 than to anything happening in Amsterdam at the time.

For a listener working through the classic canon, the useful exercise is to place a Bonzai release from the mid-nineties next to a Dutch record from the same year. They are clearly the same genre and they are clearly not trying to do the same thing. Holding both in view is what stops the classic era from collapsing into a single national story.