BorkHavn Review by Sonic Immersion

Another very nice review came in on the BorkHavn album I did together with Ron Boots. This time by Bert Strolenberg of Sonic Immersion. He gave our album 4 stars. Which is actually a lot since Bert very rarely gives our more and he put the 'My Choice' label on the review which mean he would buy the album himself. You can find the review on his website on this url: http://www.sonicimmersion.org/ron-boots-synthnl-borkhavn/. I also put the text of the review below. 

More information on the album here: https://www.synth.nl/music/collaborations/borkhavn

Ron Boots & Synth.nl – BorkHavn
CD/DIGITAL DOWNLOAD, Groove Unlimited, 2020

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Many will recall Ron & Michel’s fine debut album “Refuge en Verre” based on music drafts made during a vacation of both families in Belgium. A decade later “BorkHavn” sees the light of day, distilled from live improvised music made in a similar setting a few years later during a vacation in Denmark. Make no mistake though as “BorkHavn” is a different sonic breed as its predecessor. As the musicians elaborate in the liner notes, the music is an true expression of their friendship. It’s also a powerful statement showing how both musicians complement each other in a surprising as well as beautiful manner.

The nine tracks feature emotive electronic music with a strong dynamic current connecting them. Many string pads and drums pass by on the outcome taking various twists and turns as its progresses. There’s the dynamic undercurrent sensed on the engaging opening title. Things take on an energizing orchestral/symphonic shape “Nordsøen”, entering psychedelic-infused and slightly experimental territory on “Gåpåmod”, firing off a powerful sequencer-lead on the jolly “Hjortebøf” while reflective sonic universes open up on “Stjernekiggeri” and “Torden”. Energy runs high on the freestyle yet groovy “Vindmøller” with a slice of “Acoustic Shadows” thrown in on the first half before the lush “Venskab” brings the album to a closure.

If you want an album with solid, attentively-made electronic music, “BorkHavn” should be your pick without hesitation.

Website: http://www.groove.nl

 
 

BorkHavn Review by Schallwende

Now that the BorkHavn CDs are in also the first reactions are coming in. This is always the nicest part about releasing an album. As you might know producing this kind of music you don't do for the money, but it is nice if you can make people happy with your music. So far reactions have been very positive and BorkHavn also got some radio airplay already. But also the first reviews are coming in. I wanted to share this very nice review by the German Electronic Music club Schallwende with you. It was written by the CEO herself. It was originally in German, but it was translated to English here. The link to the original German version is here: https://www.synth.nl/reviews/borkhavn/1213-borkhavn-schallwende

Ron Boots & Synth.nl: - BorkHavn
 
It has taken eight long years and now she is finally here! "BorkHavn", the second collaboration of Ron Boots and Michel van Osenbruggen, better known in the EM-Scene as Synth.NL. This great record was created as a rough version during a relaxed family holiday of the Boots' and van Osenbruggens. During the day they enjoyed the beach life and the beautiful nature in Borkhavn, Denmark, and in the evening Ron & Michel "buried" themselves in the small improvised studio, which they had equipped with their brought along mini-equipment. Already the two thoroughbred musicians started to improvise. During these sessions I would have loved to listen and see ... Michel and Ron assure us that all the music on the present album was improvised live in this cottage.
 
The holiday together must have been musically very fertile for both of them, otherwise such an excellent record would not have come out. Unfortunately, the two of them withheld this jewel from us for many years and we were longing to find out whether and how things would continue after their joint debut in 2010 "Refuge En Verre". "Polished" and remixed in October and November 2020, the CD fortunately made it into this year's pre-Christmas season. "BorkHavn" is another ray of hope in these dark times of crisis, next to Electric Mud's "Quiet Days on Earth"- my CD of the year. (see my review in schalldruck No. 54.)
 
Of course the music doesn't sound Christmassy, quite the contrary! It is very powerful in many parts and sometimes even martial. In my head - even when listening to it several times - always the same film is playing: Erik "the Red" defeats the roaring sea after a hard fight and discovers Greenland with his Vikings. BorkHavn has become fantastic film music. Various musical variations such as melancholy, opulence, and gentleness, wonderfully expressed by a guitar in a minor key, staccato-beaten (snare) drums, as well as dreamlike, delicate piano playing, make the album something very special. This rhythmic interplay is a very interesting sound variation, which I have not heard so often.
 
In any case, both Michel and Ron, this time from a completely different musical side than before. Two EM giants have come together, whose music makes you want more! Chapeau, dear Ron and dear Michel!
 
For me, "BorkHavn" is an extremely cinematic consolation at the end of this bizarre year. Music on, head cinema on!
If you don't have this masterpiece yet, please add it to your wish list!
Tips on how to play: BorkHavn, Nordsøen, Torden, Gåpåmod
 
Sylvia Sommerfeld

More information and sales links for the album:

https://www.synth.nl/music/collaborations/borkhavn

https://synthnl.bandcamp.com/ 

BorkHavn already available on BandCamp

 Groove Unlimited (my record label) already put BorkHavn on BandCamp. You can listen to some excerpts of some of the tracks. You can also buy the album there as MP3 or FLAC download or listen to it in the BandCamp app. I hope you like it. The physical CD's also arrived from the factory. I will pick them up from Ron this weekend. The album will also be soon on the Download Shop of Groove Unlimited as MP3 and FLAC. I will let you know when it is there. You can find it here on BandCamp: https://synthnl.bandcamp.com/album/borkhavn

BorkHavn Music is Finished

 Last week I finished the music for BorkHavn together with Ron Boots in his studio. We worked on the last details and made the final mixes together. I will have to listen to them in my own studio, but I'm sure not much will change. So the music is done finally. We recorded this music together in 2012 so it has taken quite some time. I think the end result turned out pretty great and I can't wait to heat what you think about it. The only thing left to do is the mastering and the artwork. Ron will take care of the mastering and the artwork will be my responsibility. I already finished all the text and you can already read the track descriptions on my website. You can find them here: https://www.synth.nl/music/collaborations/borkhavn. We are still on track for an 2020 release so keep an eye our for news on that. When the mastering is done I will also put some small previews on this page. I will keep you updated when I have more news. I'm really looking forward to releasing a new album. It has been too long ago, but rest assured more is coming after this.

I know is has been very quiet (again) from my side. I have been through a rough time and still am actually. I'm currently in a divorce that already lasts for 2 years and the end is not there yet. Unfortunately this meant that I had to leave everything behind including my studio. I had no place of my own and lived at my parents for about 1,5 year. I have good news as well though. I have been very lucky to find a very beautiful and sweet new girlfriend and we are living in a new apartment together now in Rotterdam. In this apartment I have a tiny studio with some equipment I saved from my Apollo studio. I usually name my studios, but I haven't come up with a good one yet. More good news is that I am composing and producing new music again. So finally all the music I have been promising for the last years is coming to you. I'm sorry it took so long. The first release will come very soon. It will be a second album together with Ron Boots. Just like the first one we recorded new music live and improvised during a family holiday. This time we spend a week in Bork Havn in Denmark. At this moment Ron and myself are adding some details in the 9 tracks we selected to go on the album and we will start mixing and mastering very soon. We also finished the artwork already and here you get the first sneak preview of the album cover. I will update you with more information as it gets available. I have accumulated a lot of material since my last solo release in 2011. So don't worry. A lot more is coming! But first things first. Keep an eye out for BorkHavn. I think it has become a really beautiful album that represents the friendship between Ron and myself. The music is different from our first album together, but the people that heard it so far liked it a lot :) I did leave social media by the way. So please subscribe to my news letter on the website http://www.synth.nl when you want to be kept up to date. (or send me an E-mail on michel@synth.nl and I will add you manually). More to follow soon....

Best Wishes for 2018 and New Music Coming

Hi, first of all I'd like to wish to all the very best for 2018. Happy New-year ! I know some of you wonder if I'm still alive. Well the answer is yes, but the last years I have been very busy with both RenderFarm.NL and Virtiso. By now I have sold both of these companies and I'm a free man again. In the end it gave me too much stress and I almost suffered another burnout. So I decided it was enough. I'm still involved in the background with my first company BIT BV, and will continue to do so. No plans at this moment to start something new. The good news from this all is that I had time to completely rebuild the studio last year. I sold a lot of my vintage synthesizers and bought new stuff equipment back. I also bought some synthesizers I had as keys back as modules without a keyboard. I took all cabling out and completely redid everything. On of the new additions it the Roland V-Piano you see me playing on here. I really love this thing. The 88 keys weighted keyboard is so nice to play on. I will show more of the new studio is later posts. I also got asked a lot if new music is coming. Yes there is! I'm currently working on 2 solo albums, and also a collaboration album again with Ron Boots and also another one with Remy Stroomer. I recently also finished a single track for a sampler CD that will be released soon. I will update you all on this in time as well. I hope to release at last one of these albums in 2018. I'm working on it. Thank for you interest and let me know if you have any questions.

PrimiTiveS available as MP3 and FLAC

I have good news. PrimiTiveS is now also available from the download shop of Groove Unlimited. You can chose between two formats. Either 256 Kbit/s MP3 or Full Quality FLAC. Both files include the complete artwork. You can pay with PayPal or Ideal (from The Netherlands) and after your payment you get an immediate download link in your E-mail. All very easy and it saves you shipping costs if you are from outside Europe. You can find the download links on these URL's:

MP3 -> https://shop.groove.nl/gr-198-mp3
FLAC -> https://shop.groove.nl/gr-198-flac

More information on the album here: http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS

Ambient Visions Interview with Remy & Synth.nl

Remy and myself were recently asked to do an interview with Ambient Visions about our collaboration on PrimiTiveS. We gladly accepted this of course. Remy and I both answered half the questions and it is all about how we met and how the album evolved. I think it is an interesting read. So if you are interested you can find the whole interview on this URL:

http://www.ambientvisions.com/primitives.htm

PrimiTiveS pre-order possible from Groove Unlimited

Remy and myself finished our work on our PrimiTiveS album. Wouter is very busy now for us doing his mastering art. We can hardly wait for the final release on the 6th of April. In the mean time Groove Unlimited is already preparing the release as well. From now on you can already pre-order the album from the Groove Unlimited CD shop. If you want to get it as one of the first I would say go to the website an order your copy. We will have audio clips available very soon, but I guess when you like Remy's and Synth.nl music you don't have to wait for that ;) You can pre-order your copy on this URL: http://www.groove.nl/jump2.php?artiest=synth.nl. If you want to be sure you can also get your copy first hand on the E-day festival on the 6th of april in Oirschot in the Netherlands. There are still tickets available. More information on http://www.e-live.nl/. More information soon!

PrimiTiveS Artwork Pre-Renders

This weekend I had another studio session with Remy Stroom in my studio. We are really almost done with the music for the album now. There is only one more studio session planned for the final touches. We also finished the artwork for the album now. I made some pre-renders of the artwork so you know what it will look like when it is finished. It always gives a nice idea to put the images on a jewel case for a rough idea. I thought it would be nice to share there views with you. I presented the cover before but in the picture on the left you can see the pre-render of the front of the CD.

And in the picture on the right is a render of the back of the CD. You can also find the track list here. As you can see the CD hold 9 tracks and it will be approximately 72 minutes in length. Today also Ron Boots visited my studio and we listened to the album. He agreed with us that this album is a good mix between Remy and Synth.nl and that it is music neither of us would have made on our own. I hope that gets you excited :) At least we are for sure.

And here you can see what you will see when you open the CD. There is also a little story about Remy and myself and how this album came about. In the mean time this story is also on my website together with the track list on this URL http://www.synth.nl/Primitives. Here there will be some audio material to listen to as well very soon and the links where you can pre-order the album as soon as that is possible. I will keep you posted on that. I hope you like the artwork in the mean time. Btw. You can click the pictures for larger versions. More information coming soon!

PrimiTiveS Studio Session with Remy and Wouter

At the moment Remy and I are working hard on finishing the collaboration album we are working on called 'PrimiTiveS'. Recently we had another session in my studio and this time also Wouter Bessels joined us. Wouter is Remy's mastering engineer and he will also do the mastering of our upcoming album. It was nice to chat a bit with the both of them, but we also did some hard work. Remy and I played the last lines of music so from now on it is only producing, mixing and mastering. The hard work has begun.

Wouter didn't stay all day, but we discussed a good bit about what we would expect from his mastering work. I worked with two different mastering engineers so far and they all have a different approach I guess. Wouter sure knows what he is talking about though so I have confidence in him :) He did like the rough mixes we have so far, so I guess we are getting somewhere soon. We have to by the way since the dead line is nearing. We discussed with Wouter that we would have to deliver track end februari. And that is soon.

This weekend Remy is coming over again and we have another final session planned in the first weekend of March. That will be the last chance to make any alterations. This weekend we will also finalize the artwork and we will probably share that with you after the weekend. We already determined the track names etc, but now also the track lengths are knows, so expect an update on that soon as well. I know you are all waiting for audio samples. You can expect those somewhere next month I guess. It is getting very exciting for me 2012 was a year without any release, so I cannot wait to get some new music to you guys. Keep on reading here for more news :)

PrimiTiveS Cover and Release Date

Just before the end of the year I had another meeting with Remy Stroomer to work on our collaboration album called 'PrimiTiveS'. Initially this project was planned for 2012, but we didn't make that deadline. We did set another dead line though. The release of this album is planned for the 6th of April during the yearly E-day festival in Oirschot that is organized by my record label Groove Unlimited. We also worked on the artwork some more and in the picture on the left you see the cover of the album. The album will be released by Groove Unlimited and will be for sale as a regular CD and and MP3 and FLAC download. I hope to update you with more news, artwork, soundclips etc soon. But I thought this was good news to start 2013 with and I wanted to share it with you. We are going to work some more now on the final mixing, mastering etc. Talk to you soon!

New album with Remy will be called Primitives

At the moment I'm very busy working on a new collaboration album together with Remy Stroomer. We did a lot of sessions together in both our studios and things are getting shape. We have about 68 minutes of music divided over 9 tracks. I personally think this is going to be a very special collaboration. The mixture of Remy's Klause Schulze orientation and my Vangelis influence and also both our love for Jean Michel Jarre's music will make this a very interesting mix I think. We are still working hard and we were still planning for a release later this year, but we do not dare to name a release date yet. But we did decide on an album title. The album will be called 'Primitives'. We will let you wonder about why. I'm also working hard on the artwork. More details will follow as soon as possible.

Both Remy and myself will be present at both the Electronic Circus Festival in Guterloh Germany (http://www.electronic-circus.net/) on the 22th of September as on the E-live Festival in Oirschot in The Netherlands (http://www.e-live.nl) on the 27th of October. We wont make the release for Gutersloh, but Oirschot we are aiming for. I'm just not sure we will make it, still lots of work and we don't want to rush it. We WILL have a sneak preview with us though so you CAN take a listen for sure already. Talk to you soon!

Another Studio Session with Remy Stroomer

Yesterday I did another very productive session together with Remy Stroomer in my studio for our upcoming collaboration album. The last weeks we did a lot of work editing on the material we already had played. The first thing we did yesterday is listen together to everything again and make remarks about the tracks, note them down and discuss what we both though was necessary to make them better. We agreed on almost everything there fortunately. We both thought one track didn't quite fit the whole concept and feel of the album and decided to play some new lines for that. Eventually we almost completely changed that whole track.

We have 10 tracks left now where we are still not sure about 1 track. That one still needs a lot of work, but we agreed that I'm going to try and work on this on next week and then we will decide later if we keep it on the album or not. We still have 79 minutes of music at the moment so plenty enough for a whole album. We divided the rest of the tracks yesterday so that Remy can work on some in his studio now and I can work in my studio on the other ones. In a couple of weeks we meet again and will do another session. All in all the progress of the whole album is going very well and we are still on schedule for a release by the end of this year I guess. I'll update you of course when there is news.

Back from Denmark with Ron Boots and Families

We just got back from a great week on holiday together with Ron Boots and both our families. We rented a house in Borkhavn in Denmark for a week and we all enjoyed ourselves very much. We had a lot of luck with the weather over there. A lot of sunshine and no rain. We even got sunburn when we visited the Legoland park. Next to the little trips we took over there and the nice dinners and lunches, we also made a lot of new music. In the picture you can see the temporary studio we created in the living room, were we played a lot together. Ron is playing the Korg Kronos and I was playing the Clavia Nord Wave. We recorded everything on my notebook even though Ron brought his notebook too. I had a listen back to the music and I think the outcome is really interesting and very different from what we played on 'Refuge en Verre' last time.

Here is another nice picture of Ron and me that we took on one of the trips. The nature around Borkhavn is really great and you can even encounter a lot of wildlife. We had a really close encounter by the way with 6 deers that crossed the road when we were driving about 100 Km/h. We had to break very hard not to hit them. Quite a scary experience I can tell you. From now on we are going to take these 'animal crossing' warning signs seriously ;) Back home now I'm going to see if I can open all the Cakewalk projects on my studio PC and I guess Ron and me will be starting by selecting some tracks from the stuff we played for release consideration. We really have a lot, so we can be selective. I'll visit Ron next week to listen to it all and then we will decide what will happen with it. But my feeling is that we have enough good stuff for a CD release. But of course it is a collaboration project, so it is not only up to me. I'll let you know when we made a decision on this matter. Now back to my normal life :)

Another Studio Session with Remy

As you might have heard before, I'm working on a collaboration album with Remy Stroomer. We already did some sessions in his and mine studio and yesterday we did another session in my studio. My wife took a couple of pictures when we were just getting ready to play some more music together. In the mean time we have nearly 80 minutes of music that we both like and that should be enough for the album. So now the editing and production fase will start.

There is still a lot of work to be done from now on for the both of us, but we are making good progress. I cannot make any promises yet, but I hope we can release it somewhere in the end of this year. I'll keep you informed about that on here. So keep an eye out for more news on this blog. I can promise you already though that it will be an interesting mix of both our styles. I hope you can all have a little bit of patience for it :) OK. Back to work.

Remy and Synth.nl in the Apollo Studio

Here is a picture of Remy Stroomer and me playing music together in my studio. Remy is a very gifted musician who releases music on his own record label 'Desert Island Music' simply under his first name 'Remy' and like me is inspired by Jarre,  but his music also tends towards Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. We have met on several music festivals and he also arranged the meeting I had with Jean Michel Jarre a while ago. We have talked about doing some music together a long while ago and the first result was the contribution that I did on his last solo release called 'I-Dentity'. But I have good news: There is more to come. I'm currently working on two other projects together with Remy, but I can't give you the details just yet. But keep an eye out for news :) I'll let you know as soon as things are more clear. But for starters we have had already two very nice and inspiring sessions in my studio and soon I'll be visiting his studio for more.