Artist Profile: Young Marco

There is a moment that proves everything Marco Sterk has spent two decades becoming. It is August 2022, and Boiler Room's cameras are on Dekmantel Festival in Amsterdam. Sterk, known as Young Marco, cues up the final track of his set. A chopped vocal, sampled from Imogen Heap's 2005 ballad "Hide and Seek," drifts over a driving pulse. As the crowd erupts, Sterk does almost nothing but stand behind the mixer and allows himself a small, private smile. At this time, his track "What You Say?" had not yet been released. Within weeks, Skrillex, Fred again.., Peggy Gou, and Four Tet were all playing it. By the time it saw release in January 2023, it had become his first Beatport number one. This scene condenses Young Marco's career into a single image. Here was an artist long admired for taste, subtlety, and leftfield curation suddenly producing a crossover anthem that carried the same aesthetic logic as his earlier work. 

Born in the Frisian town of Sneek in 1984, Sterk moved to Amsterdam at 18 and entered the music scene through work at Rush Hour, the legendary record shop, first as an in-house graphic designer and later in A&R. A friendship with Red Light Records further deepened his appetite for spaced out and exotic sounds. Known as The Psychic Gym, Young Marco's studio sat above Red Light Radio, in a former private gym reportedly once used by a pimp, complete with steel-plated door, mirrored walls, and hidden safe. His DJ style was forged in Amsterdam's smaller rooms and residencies. Sterk developed a style defined by range, quick shifts, and unexpected adjacency, mixing more from hip-hop cuts than from the seamless blends of house and techno.

That also helps explain why his recorded output has always resisted easy categorization. The early 12-inches, Moving Fast (Very Slowly) / High Tide, Nonono b/w Darwin in Bahia, and Video Days b/w Later Than U Think, established a producer drawn to atmosphere and textured movement. Then came Biology in 2014 on ESP Institute, still one of the clearest maps to his sensibility. It is a shimmering, inward record, full of humid synth haze and gently altered states. Five years later, Bahasa deepened things considerably. The record carried a personal charge and is one of his most transportive works, a record in which rhythm feels suspended in tropical air.

As a remixer, Sterk has been nothing short of prolific. Reworks for Robyn, Fever Ray, Sébastien Tellier, Chicane, and Metronomy refracted the source material through his hallucinatory filter, while his 2013 Tony G "Dreams" remix became one of the most sought-after records of that period. In late 2015, the best of these were collected on Sorry For The Late Reply, which also inaugurated Safe Trip.

Safe Trip is one of the strongest arguments for Young Marco's importance beyond the booth. It has become one of underground dance music's most dependable curatorial voices, balancing new releases from artists like Dazion, Ben Penn, and Private Eyes with lovingly researched compilations and reissues. Most significant is the Welcome to Paradise series, a multi-volume excavation of Italian Dream House from roughly 1989 to 1994. Those compilations repositioned Dream House as an emotionally serious, utopian force. Planet Love, his survey of formative trance, extended his archival taste logic.

His collaborative instincts extend well beyond the label. In 2014, he joined Gigi Masin and Jonny Nash to form Gaussian Curve. Their debut, Clouds, consisted largely of one-take improvisations and became one of the most admired ambient albums of the decade. Its follow-up, The Distance, arrived in 2017. More recently, Dead Sound, his collaboration with John Moods, extended into more psychedelic-pop terrain on 2024's Into The Void.

In 2022, Sterk scored his first feature film, Met mes, award-winning director Sam de Jong's neon-soaked Dutch satire, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. De Jong's need for processed vocal effects led Sterk back to Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek," and during lockdown, he built a track around the sample that would become "What You Say?"

His standing as a mix artist is no less central to his reputation. Recordings such as Dekmantel Podcast 025, RA.571, Boiler Room sessions, radio appearances, and later long-form broadcasts helped establish him as one of those rare DJs whose mixes function almost like essays. In 2023, riding the momentum of "What You Say?," he delivered a two-hour BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix and closed Dekmantel's main stage.

In 2026, the schedule suggests no slowing down. Dates at Sound Department in Taranto, DGTL in Amsterdam, and Dekmantel Selectors in Croatia point to an artist who now moves easily between underground and festival. That arc once again dips into the underground with his forthcoming appearance at Control Club on March 27.

For now, he continues to dig through crates and, increasingly, through overlooked CD compilations for records that everybody else missed. Asked by his close friend Hunee what separates him from other DJs, Sterk's answer was characteristically simple, "A whole lotta love." In Young Marco's case, love becomes a way of keeping a record open to new meanings.