Dvbbs live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, March 2013

The name on the announcement was spelled Dvbbs, and the letters were a small piece of history. Two brothers from Orangeville, Ontario, had begun as a group called Dubbs with a third member, Sinotte. When he left in 2012, Christopher and Alexandre van den Hoef kept the name and swapped its vowel for a V.

On 13 January 2013 the promoter Loffredo & Associates announced the duo for Crocks, with a date in March. It followed the announcement for Ill Bill and Vinnie Paz by three days.

Where the duo stood in that spring

By then the brothers had one release that counted. Initio, their first EP, came out in March 2012 after two months of work, and it drew on house, electronic, dubstep and reggae. Biographies place their move to Los Angeles in 2012 as well, so the pair had left Ontario for California less than a year before the Thunder Bay booking.

Their father is Dutch and their mother Greek Canadian. The record they are best known for later went out on a Dutch label, a neat echo of that family history.

Tsunami, made with Borgeous, was released on 19 August 2013 on Doorn Records, the label of the Dutch DJ Sander van Doorn, and on Spinnin’ Records. In March it did not exist yet. The track was written and produced by KSHMR and is classed as big room house, three minutes and fifty-seven seconds long.

The Tsunami mystery

Tsunami reached number one on the Beatport 100 within a week of release. In Canada it peaked at number 80 on the Hot 100 and later went platinum, at 80,000 units. It also topped dance charts in Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland, and reached number three in France.

Its release was oddly staged. The producers were kept out of the credits until days before the release. Sander van Doorn promoted the track before denying that it was his, and the authorship stayed unclear for a while. The BBC Radio 1 presenter Pete Tong named Dvbbs and Borgeous as the artists on 16 August 2013, three days before the release date.

A Thunder Bay club that booked the brothers in January had therefore booked them about seven months ahead of the moment the name became international, and about two months ahead of the show itself. That is a reading of the dates, not a stated reason, and it makes the booking look early.

After the date

The Thunder Bay booking sits early in a short, steep career. After Tsunami the duo signed with a run of labels, among them Universal, Kanary, Doorn, Spinnin’ Records and Ultra, and they now split their time between Los Angeles and Toronto. The single has since passed a billion streams.

None of that was visible in January 2013. The public evidence then was a twelve-month-old EP, a new spelling of a name, and a base in California for two brothers who came from a town in Dufferin County, Ontario.

The winter also had a wider backdrop. Baauer’s Harlem Shake, released on Diplo’s Mad Decent label, was spreading across YouTube in the months around the booking, so electronic music was in the news well outside clubs.

That is context, not a stated reason for the booking.

It also helps to remember that Thunder Bay is a city of roughly 108,000 people on Lake Superior, where an electronic night has to draw from a small pool.

What else was on the Crocks calendar

Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South, near the Lake Superior waterfront, and its calendar in early 2013 mixed rap and electronic dates. Ill Bill and Vinnie Paz were billed for February, and so was Riff Raff. Dvbbs were the only electronic act of the three.

Dance music was not new to the room. A DJ tribute night to Avicii and LMFAO had run on 25 February 2012, and the events post that listed it also carried a six-DJ night the day before.

The other dates that season are on the shows page. Which songs the brothers played in Thunder Bay went unrecorded.