This text was created based on interviews with Eric Rozen, Sylvie Lemaître, Stijn Van Nuffelen, and Florence Atlas in April 2025. The Out Soon archive was digitized by Sandy Lievens and belongs to the personal collection of Steven Keimi.
The history of club culture doesn’t lend itself to an easy reading. “It is a ritual built on disappearance, where you lose yourself in time, name, ego, and even memory.” This is one of the most striking quotes I’ve ever heard about club culture. Anyone who’s ever spent a night within the four walls of a nightclub, spellbound by a DJ’s soundtrack, can likely relate. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten who actually said it. Even the almighty internet won’t help me. As a researcher and author, that’s rather inconvenient, I can hardly pretend I came up with it myself. Still, the quote doesn’t lose its power. And it helps me tremendously to kick off this story. Because when memories fade and the cleaning crew mops the dance floor back to a shine, Out Soon will remain.
Out Soon was a free Belgian magazine published from 1992 to 2008. At its peak, it distributed no fewer than 50,000 copies each month across clubs, record shops, bars, restaurants, clothing stores, and other trendy spots. Launched in November 1992 , Out Soon revolved around nightlife and music as its unifying themes. The magazine bridged Belgium’s language division by publishing in both Dutch and French—no word was left untranslated. Over its 16-year run, the magazine remained free thanks to advertising from a wide range of brands: clubs, record labels, fashion lines, energy drinks, cigarette brands, security firms, taxi companies, and more. Established well before the internet took hold, Out Soon became the ultimate medium for a community of electronic music and club culture devotees. In retrospect, it stands as the most important archive of a long-lost and utterly exciting era.
Infancy
Club culture was still in its infancy when Out Soon launched in 1992. Just three years earlier, thousands of British club kids had flocked to Ibiza for the summer of their lives, the so-called Second Summer of Love, often seen as year zero for Western club culture. Already in the 1980s, young people in American cities like Detroit and Chicago were experimenting with drum machines and synthesizers. Meanwhile, in Belgium, a similar energy was brewing, where the music sounded energetic and industrial, think of the Electronic Body Music (EBM) of Front 242, or slow and imposing, like the new beat of A Split Second.
But house and techno are, at their core, Black music genres, born from a fusion of disco, soul, and funk, combined with drum machines like the Roland TR-606, 707, 808, or 909, and bassline synthesizers such as the Roland TB-303 , depending on the subgenre. These were the roots from which hundreds of offshoots would later emerge. Today, the landscape is impossible to grasp in full: a vast potpourri of sounds, tastes, and cultures, encompassing both the mainstream and the underground. Back in 1992, however, electronic dance music was still very much a countercultural movement.
For Those Who Know
From the very beginning, electronic dance music swept up those who were open to it. Many clubbers speak lyrically about their first time, their first favorite track, their first club experience. And the brand-new music certainly had a lot to offer. Even from a distance, visitors to a rave or club could hear the muffled kick drum carried on the wind. The repetitive, trance-like, and exhilarating rhythm, conjured up by young people using new technology, had a hypnotic effect. Those who surrendered to it soon felt part of a new community. There, on the dance floor, one could break free from the rigid, neoliberal society and its towering expectations. And as is typical of any emerging youth culture, the new generation did everything differently from the one before. Clubbers dressed defiantly and spoke in their own slang, peppered with English. “Jack Your Body,” “Do you have a flyer for the rave?” or “Is there a chill-out at the afterclub?” — phrases that are commonplace today but were pure insider language at the time. As Out Soon founder Eric Rozen put it: “If you were walking through the city and heard a car playing techno, you just knew you’d recognize the driver.”
Out Soon Start
Eric Rozen was 28 years old in 1992. By then, he had already built a varied career — as a stylist for the television channel RTL and as a yoga teacher (a profession he still practices today). He was also passionate about electronic music, a true early adopter. As early as the late 1980s, he was frequenting the trendiest clubs where this new music was being played, such as La Gaîté in Brussels. It was there that DJ Eric Beysens showed him his first record sleeve with a smiley face on it. He went to Le Vaudeville in Brussels, to Boccaccio in Destelbergen, where the club was packed on Monday nights, and to Globe in Stabroek on Sunday afternoons.
Today, clubbers are bombarded with digital invites to parties and club nights via social media, swept up in the same algorithm that eagerly shoves skateboarding dogs or weight-loss products down your throat. None of that existed in the early ’90s. It’s hard to imagine now, but to find out where the party was, clubbers had to leave the house and hit the streets. A paper flyer announcing a club night or rave could be found — if you were lucky — in a record shop (the unofficial clubhouse of nightlife culture, open during the day and throughout the week), through word of mouth, or picked up at the club itself. Eric Rozen noticed this too. Everyone was searching for the same information. He found a solution during his many trips to New York. In the Big Apple’s gay community, small, foldable magazines were being distributed.
Eric Rozen pitched his idea to the biggest clubs in the country. He offered them an ad in his magazine — with regional exclusivity, yes — but still, ads from their competitors would also appear. That strategy was crucial, because his magazine had to be free, no matter what. It was a bold idea, but it worked. Boccaccio, La Rocca, Globe, Le Vaudeville, La Demence, and several other clubs booked ad space. Rozen also convinced SPM Dance Division — a Liège-based recording studio, distributor, and publisher — to advertise, along with a few restaurants, a video shop, and a sexy lingerie boutique. He asked Antwerp’s record store USA Import and its Ghent counterpart Music Man to review new releases, and recruited a film lover to preview upcoming movies. Under the section House World, he put his friend and DJ Eric Beysens on the spot in a short interview. In the News column, he wrote about the reopening of club Barocci and the upcoming MAYDAY megarave in Berlin, which was expected to draw 14,000 visitors. In the very first editorial, Eric Rozen’s excitement jumped off the page. Out Soon was here to stay or as the editorial concluded: “You will no longer have any excuses not to be where you’re supposed to be!”
Solo Operation
Before 1992, Eric Rozen had never even seen a computer up close. He found support from the publishers of the Belgian magazine Rock This Town, who took care of the Dutch translation and the layout. Preparing a single issue was quite an undertaking. He would send the texts on a floppy disk via courier to the translator, who then returned the precious item. Meanwhile, Eric gathered all the advertisements and developed the photos himself. He handed everything off to a courier, who brought the material to Rock This Town’s graphic designer. For each page, the designer sent back four separate films, in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, for a final check. Once Eric approved the result, he sent it all, again via courier, to the printer. Not long after, the printed magazines would arrive. Eric managed this entire operation alone from his small apartment in Brussels. He didn’t have a driver’s license, but thanks to his vast network, the magazines still found their way to clubs and cities across the country. Every issue was a feat of logistics and a true piece of pioneering work.
Cover & Content
For the cover of his new magazine, Eric Rozen drew inspiration from three of his favorite worlds: India, comic books, and pop culture. And he did so — true to the spirit of the pre-internet era — using old-school cut-and-paste techniques, working with images from books, magazines, and graphic novels. from the iconic comic Le Lama Blanc by Alejandro Jodorowsky, or from the French magazine Métal Hurlant, known for its mix of science fiction and horror illustrations. For issue 14, after much persistence, he managed to convince the French photographers Pierre & Gilles to allow him to use one of their photos for the cover.
With Out Soon, Eric Rozen created a playground where all his passions came together. He worked 18 hours a day, had the time of his life, and spent his weekend nights in clubs. His magazine captured the spirit of the times, bringing what was happening in nightlife and record stores straight to the so-called house community—the name used back then for the whole scene, whether you were into house, techno, or trance. In the beginning, the magazine had just a few hundred readers, but that number quickly grew—along with the number of pages per issue, which by 1994, two years after its launch, already reached around 100. The magazine had shifted from a foldable poster to A4 format (eventually becoming A5). Each edition had its own theme —The Energy Issue, The Native Issue, The Ambient Issue, The London Issue, and so on — sometimes serving merely as a convenient label, but often inspiring in-depth features. For example, The Alternative Issue in 1994 drew attention to the dangers of the popularization of “our movement.” And in Out Soon 23, published in January 1995, the magazine explored the then-futuristic concept of Virtual Reality.
Design
Meanwhile, Out Soon was rapidly expanding. In March 1994, Sylvie Lemaître joined the team as the magazine’s first fully-fledged graphic designer. A self-taught creative, her approach would come to define the magazine’s visual identity. She first connected with Eric Rozen while submitting ads for Décadence, a rave she helped organize. Looking back, she describes it as a time of complete artistic freedom. Each issue felt, to her, like one big flyer. In addition to developing a basic structure for recurring sections, like the ever-growing event calendar and introducing a consistent typeface, she created a unique visual universe for every article. Her design work evolved in tandem with the available technology: every time new software features were introduced, Sylvie dove right in. She worked on a Mac and used QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop to shape the look of Out Soon.
In 1992, German computer engineer Kai Krause developed Kai’s Power Tools, a set of Photoshop plugins that allowed users to apply a wide range of effects to images. These were tools that are now standard in most design software, such as a chrome filter for metallic effects or a fractal explorer for generating complex patterns and shapes. But in the 1990s, they opened up entirely new creative worlds. The results were imaginative and futuristic designs that perfectly matched the energetic electronic music of the time, music that was also being made with computers.
Fonts were important too, though not as easily accessible or affordable as they are today. In the 1990s, influential British designer Neville Brody co-founded the leading type foundry FontFont and, starting in 1991, co-published Fuse — a magazine packaged in a cardboard box. Inside were four A2 posters and a floppy disk containing the featured typefaces, each designed by various experimental designers. These fonts quickly found their way into club culture. As Sylvie Lemaître herself put it: “I had a crush on Neville Brody’s fonts.”
DIY
Sylvie Lemaître was responsible for the design of Out Soon until early 1999. She helped the magazine evolve from a fanzine into a fully-fledged publication. Her sense of experimentation and discovery were her greatest strengths. Eric Rozen recognized her talent despite her lack of formal training and handed her the creative reins of his magazine. The two shared a strong mutual understanding; Eric, too, had entered the publishing world without any prior experience.
It’s no coincidence that in the early years of Belgian club culture — those utopian 1990s, filled with dreams of virtual reality — a magazine with such drive and DIY ethos came into being. Out Soon was a true passion project, where, especially as deadlines approached, long days and short nights were the norm for the team, unless they were out on the dance floor.
Community Is Key
Out Soon began as an in-house magazine of a small, headstrong community. With his charismatic approach, founder Eric Rozen aimed to create an inclusive magazine unbothered by subgenres, BPMs, or stylistic boundaries. It positioned itself as a publication by and for all clubbers — free, bilingual, and guided by a politique sans jugement. In doing so, Out Soon became the unofficial spokesperson of nightlife, the voice of the clubber, and often stood up for a culture that, to the general public, was still widely seen as Sodom and Gomorrah. In 1993, for instance, it organized a petition and press conference under the title House Is Not a Crime, hoping to shift public opinion and counter the negative image of club culture. The PR campaign was a response to mayors threatening clubs with raids and closures, and to the one-sided scapegoating of the scene in the national media.
Professionalisation
Toward the end of the 1990s, the community had grown into a full-fledged industry. Techno and house were no longer confined to the underground or seen solely as counterculture, they had become popular music genres reaching massive audiences. The French duo Daft Punk evolved from a DIY act in Paris, performing anonymously to a few hundred partygoers at Brussels’ Fuse in 1995, into a global stadium sensation just a few years later. Out Soon first mentioned Daft Punk in 1995, in playlists, and shortly after described them as “the newest techno phenomenon.” By 1997, journalist Bart Vandormael called them the future of dance music. That same year, they performed at the first edition of I LOVE TECHNO at Flanders Expo in Ghent, a festival that had already packed the Gentse Vooruit multiple times, but now, thanks to the Daft Punk hype, sold four times as many tickets and relocated to the city’s massive expo halls. Electronic dance music was on the verge of exploding and Out Soon exploded right along with it.
Money, Money, Money
During his early attempts to sell ad space in Out Soon, Eric Rozen quickly noticed that big brands turned up their noses at nightlife. Influenced by the constant demonization of the night by governments and mainstream media, they kept their wallets firmly closed. That changed radically as electronic dance music and club culture evolved from niche to mainstream throughout the 1990s. Where Out Soon initially sold ads within the scene itself, to parties, clubs, festivals, record shops, labels, and other industry players, it soon began attracting money from the grown-up world. Unsurprisingly, it was the powerful cigarette brands that were first to invest their tainted money in Out Soon, starting in 1994. Their full-page ads stood out like a sore thumb, an anomaly amidst flyers for parties that often spoofed major brands in proper countercultural fashion, with parodies of Kellogg’s, La Vache Qui Rit, or Back to the Future.
The following year, clothing brand Diesel jumped in, buying six pages at once for a fashion photoshoot promoting a line of sunglasses. Belgian beverage importer Jet Import followed with ads for Corona, the Mexican beer. In October 1995, Guarana became the first to promote an energy drink in Out Soon, marketing its Pure Energy Drink with the tagline: “have your first legal XTC.” By March 1996, Jet Import introduced Red Bull: “a non-alcoholic drink specially designed for those moments when your body needs an extra boost.” From 1997 onward, the floodgates opened. More tobacco brands followed, along with Foot Locker, Reebok, Nike, Smart, and Levi’s, all finding their way into Out Soon.
In a letter to the editor published in Out Soon 18 in July 1994, Gunther remarked that “money was threatening to blur the roots of house — a revival of primitive, Native American rituals through modern technology.” He called on the house nation to protect itself from this. Editor-in-chief Eric Rozen agreed in a brief response beneath the letter: “At all costs, we must spread our philosophy, which is and will remain a positive force.” Rozen had launched Out Soon from the bottom up, driven by the unifying and forward-looking energy of an emerging counterculture. Throughout the 1990s, Out Soon didn’t shy away from taking social and political positions, defending not only the interests of its own scene, but also tackling broader societal issues. It published articles with bold titles like Extreme Right? Never Again!, House Against Racism, and Stop The Bombs. Under the motto We only have one Earth, it even donated a page to Greenpeace. Out Soon also informed readers about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and about drug use, long before government campaigns or publicly funded NGOs took on that role.
Despite its world-improving mission and independent foundation, Out Soon also felt the pressure of the capitalist market. And it couldn’t have been otherwise — not if it wanted to remain a free magazine. The costs for printing an ever-thicker Out Soon in ever-larger circulation were skyrocketing. Growth came with professionalization and diversification, as well as a growing team. Graphic designer Stijn Van Nuffelen, who joined Out Soon in 2000, dedicated nearly half of the magazine’s pages to advertising at its peak. Meanwhile, the editorial team was flooded with press releases, new CDs, and interview requests. A team of freelance writers, often DJs themselves, handled interviews and reviews, picked up on trends, and reported from the scene.
Nearly Game Over
Headtrick Media Group was a television production company that around the turn of the millennium invested millions in ambitious dot-com ventures. As part of a large-scale web project, the company acquired Out Soon, which was to serve as the lifestyle and youth branch of the rapidly growing media group. Out Soon moved to Antwerp, and Eric Rozen was given a position within the company. Just over six months later, however, Headtrick Media Group filed for bankruptcy—red-faced and defeated. Out Soon appeared to go down with the burst dot-com bubble: issue 85 never made it to print. But in a near-miraculous twist, one signature had been missing from the original sales contract—allowing Out Soon to survive by the skin of its teeth.
2000s
A few months later, advertising agency Duval Guillaume acquired Out Soon—this time with a signed contract. Eric Rozen quickly stepped away from the spotlight. After ten years at the helm of the magazine, he was ready for new challenges. Readers barely noticed the transition. Designer Stijn Van Nuffelen had already ushered Out Soon into the 21st century with a sleek, contemporary design. And Out Soon went online. The entire content of the magazine, including its flagship feature, the party agenda, was uploaded to the web. Under the new ownership, the team began experimenting with video reports from parties, something Stijn had already been doing at his own events in his spare time. This even led to one season of Out Soon TV on the now-defunct music channel TMF.
Out Soon was riding high, with 50,000 copies distributed across the country every week. But appearances can be deceiving. With the rapid rise of the internet, more and more companies began shifting their advertising budgets from print to online media. By the mid-2000s, Out Soon saw its revenue drop visibly, forcing the team to downsize until only a small group of staff kept the magazine afloat. In 2008, Duval Guillaume pulled the plug, bringing a sudden end to what had once been Eric Rozen’s utopian, unifying, and inclusive project.
Could a relaunch have been possible? Florence Atlas, who started working at Out Soon as a student in 1998 and rose through the ranks in the 2000s, from club & event manager to editor-in-chief, believes it could have. With a mix of regret and pride, she now reflects on the magazine’s final chapter, the passion she and her colleagues poured into it, and the digital wave they ultimately missed. In 2008, together with designer Stijn Van Nuffelen, Florence launched a spin-off called Nightcode, also a monthly magazine. But after 14 issues, that light, too, went out.
Electronic Music Press
Out Soon wasn’t the only magazine in Belgium covering nightlife and electronic dance music — who still remembers Move-X or The Ticket — but it was by far the largest, best-known, and most influential. In neighboring countries too, enthusiasts launched similar magazines, most of which followed a comparable trajectory. Frontpage was the German equivalent, with which Out Soon regularly exchanged articles, though it lasted only until 1997. The French CODA Magazine had a longer run, from 1993 to 2006. Out Soon also had its sights set on the French market. Starting in 1994, it reached French clubbers — mainly in the border regions — with a few dedicated pages, and later even a short-lived French edition. Bassic Groove was the Dutch counterpart, active from 1991 to 2003.
The most influential electronic music press undoubtedly comes from the United Kingdom. Titles like Mixmag, DJ Mag, and Jockey Slut all originated in the early 1990s. The first two even managed to develop a business model that, more than 30 years later, is still standing strong. DJ Mag does so with a globally focused website, a quarterly print edition, and its annual, influential poll of the world’s Top 100 DJs. Mixmag discontinued its print edition at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but continues to exist as an online platform.
Why did the British titles succeed where Out Soon could not? The answer is simple: the scale of their operations was always much larger. When print advertising revenue began to decline — also across the Channel — British magazines, publishing in their native language and with a global outlook, managed to make a successful digital transition. The Belgian market was simply too small to sustain a magazine like Out Soon. This is also evident in today’s new Belgian initiatives, such as the print magazine Not So Difficult or the website Whathappens.be, which, despite a wealth of good intentions, remain volunteer-driven efforts. They come closest to what Out Soon once represented for Belgian nightlife — but fortunately, the new generation mostly does its own thing. And Out Soon remains etched in our collective memory as a unique, unrepeatable story. A godsend, too, for a researcher like myself.
Koen Galle
Koen Galle (born 1983) founded his publishing house, AfterClub, to uncover stories about Belgium’s rich electronic music culture and nightlife. He first got hooked on dance music in the late 1990s and eventually made a name for himself as a club and radio DJ. Over time, his fascination with the people and stories behind the music led him to begin writing and publishing.
Koen Galle is, above all, a storyteller with a deep passion for uncovering the heart of people’s experiences. With a genuine curiosity for personal stories, he immerses himself in the community to discover unheard voices. Through his work, he brings forward narratives that might otherwise fade into obscurity, offering a reliable perspective that bridges past and present, history and the contemporary scene.
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