HI-LO

The palindrome that snuck into festival techno

HI-LO started as a counter-current experiment: an anonymous alias, launched in 2015, to push a darker sound and harder basslines while Dutch future house dominated the main stages. The name is a palindrome of Oli H. The track Crank It Up opened the door; Renegade Mastah, released as the first track on Heldeep Records, unveiled the project. Wappy Flirt and Ooh La La completed that first wave, still close to bass house, before the alias found its center of gravity.

Kronos, Zeus and the year techno claimed it

the 2020 leap changed everything. Kronos, on Octopus Recordings, Zeus, on mau5trap, and Athena established a peak-time techno sound with aggressive percussion, raw synthesizers, and a club and festival scale. 1001Tracklists named him the most supported producer across all genres that year. The catalog later anchored itself in two benchmark labels: Filth On Acid, by Reinier Zonneveld —Saw of Olympus, Existencia, Balearic Mornings, String Theory, Samsara, Nirvana, Flying Octopus, plus Check with Will Clarke and HADES with T78— and Drumcode, by Adam Beyer, with Hypnos, Hera, Crescendo, Open Your Mind, Wanna Go Bang and Rabbit Hole alongside Layton Giordani. Industria, with Eli Brown, and the remix of Skyscrapers, by Nina Kraviz, confirmed that the alias was no longer just an outlet: it was a parallel career.

HILOMATIK, Freedom and Resistance

In 2023, HILOMATIK was born, a label built around this sound. There, his own tracks and collaborations with Green Velvet, Armin van Buuren, Eli Brown, Maddix, ZHU, Kasablanca and Space 92 coexist. In the booth, HI-LO has closed or headlined stages such as Ultra Resistance, Tomorrowland (Freedom), CRSSD, Factory 93, The Warehouse Project, Seismic Dance Event, Mysteryland and the Dockyard Festival at ADE, where he has even presented his own HILOMATIK Stage. His live set moves between hypnotic tensions, trance-echo melodies and large-format closers. The recent catalog —Reese, Rhythm of Life, Mercury with Space 92, Adagio For Strings with Brennan Heart— maintains that same peak-time tension. The support of Adam Beyer, Charlotte de Witte, Carl Cox, Tale of Us, Amelie Lens and Solomun, and his recurring weight in the annual Beatport charts, place him today between the underground circuit and the main stage. Born in Rotterdam, the project has gone from being the hidden face of a house producer to one of the most recognizable signatures in contemporary techno.