Quick Update on PrimiTives and E-Day

I have a quick update on PrimiTiveS for you: Everything is done for PrimiTiveS. Wouter Bessels has done an excellent job on the mastering and everything is of now to the mastering plant. I also send out the first album previews to some radio stations and the reactions are very positive. I already got 4 interview request from that, so keep posted for news on those. I also replaced the sneak preview clips I uploaded last week with the final mastered version. You can find them on the usual URL's: http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS and https://soundcloud.com/synthnl. of course this is only mp3 quality so the actual CD will be much better. More good news is that E-day goes on for sure! Enough tickets are sold now so you can definitely pick up your copy on Remy's stall on E-day 2013 on the 6th of April in Oirschot in The Netherlands. More info http://www.e-live.nl

Keep E-day Festival Alive! Order Tickets now!

The release of PrimiTiveS was planned on the yearly E-day festival that my record label Groove Unlimited organizes every year. Unfortunately the ticket sales are very bad and the event maybe cancelled :( That would be a real bummer and mean no release party for PrimiTiveS either and possible the end for the festival definately :( So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE buy a ticket and come and pick your copy up at the E-day festival in Oirschot in The Netherlands on the 6th of April. Remy and I will both be present and sign it for you if you like. E-day is a great festival with concerts all day a lot of artists present and a great atmosphere. Go buy your ticket here NOW PLEASE!

http://www.e-live.nl

Let me know if you need any assistance.

New E-Day 2013 Website Design

Twice a year Ron Boots asks me to make a new design for the yearly E-Live and E-day events Groove Unlimited organizes. This this it is E-day time again on April the 6th. I made a new header graphic based on all the pictures he got from the artists and tried to make it look a bit like they are all on stage. I hope you like it. There are still tickets available by the way for this fabulous event where also the new CD 'PrimiTiveS' by Remy and myself will be released. So some listen to some nice electronic music concerts there and pick up your copy of PrimiTives from Remy and me personally. More information on http://www.e-live.nl where you can also have a better look at the new graphic I made.

EC2012 Video Interview with Stefan Erbe (In German)

During the Electronic Circus festival in Gutersloh I did a short video interview with Stefan Erbe. The interview is in the German language. I hope you enjoy it.

E-Live 2012 Report

On the 27th of October I attended the E-live festival in Oirschot in The Netherlands. This Electronic Music event is organized yearly  by my record company Groove Unlimited. The day started with a nice event. The official release of the first release by Jeffrey Haster aka Synthex. His CD is called Pythagoras and I was glad to see that he sold out the 25 copies he had with him that day. Congratulations on the new album Jeffrey. I think it is quite an accomplishment for a 13 year old. I'm sure he will go a long way. You can get this album on the same place as you can find my music http://www.groove.nl/

After that I had to find Glenn Main. He traveled by plane from Norway and asked me if I could bring my Roland GAIA SH-01 again for him. That was no problem of course, I did the same thing for him when he played in Germany last year. Here you see us both in a very nice pictures taken by Aleksandra Przybylska who came all the way from Poland to visit the E-live festival. Thank you very much Aleksadra for the nice pictures you send me! Oh and the Synth.nl T-shirt you see in the picture was made by my wife and kids. Thank you very much for that as well girls :)

Then I got another nice surprise. The day before E-live I got an E-mail from Rob Papen telling me that his upcoming Book + DVDs about sound design were finished. He filmed for the DVDs in my studio last year and we kept in touch since then. So  I asked if he had plans during E-live and he didn't actually, so I invited him to come. I wasn't sure yet if he could make it he said, but eventually he did :) It was nice to talk to Rob again and a lot of people visiting the festival recognized him from his time in Nova and Peru. I hope it inspired Rob as well to make some music of his own again. My wife took this nice picture of us and Rob insisted in holding my Apollo album since he knew it liked it a lot he said. A nice compliment for sure :)

All in all I had a great day. I watched 3 concerts in total Glenn Main, Ruud Heij & Gert Emmens and Space Art. For the rest I had no time unfortunately. Normally on a day like this I'm very occupied by talking with everyone. I enjoyed myself a lot, but these days always fly by. There was also a set back. I planned to have the new Primitives album that I'm making together with Remy Stroomer ready, but we didn't make the deadline. We are still working on it. It is more work than we anticipated and we are both very busy as well with other things. I will keep you updated on the progress, but there is still no definitive release date set. I guess good things need time. All in all I have a great day and I probably forget a lot of stuff in this post, but one thing I don't want to forget and that is to thank Ron Boots and the rest of the E-live crew for yet another great E-live!

Electronic Circus 2012 Report

Last weekend I visited the Electronic Circus festival in Gütersloh Germany. I already went there a day ahead because of the pre-gig dinner that is organized with the artists. We had a great dinner in a Greek restaurant with very good company and a super atmosphere. In the picture you just see Dominique Perrier arriving. Dominique is one of my old time heroes because he played with Jean Michel Jarre on stage for many years. It was very nice that the Space Art crew also joined in that dinner. Thanks to Bernard Poulard for taking this picture. All in all a great night that I ended with Remy Stroomer and his wife Paulien in some Biergarten in Bielefeld where my hotel was at. It was such a nice day already and the festival didn't even start yet :)

The next morning it was back to the venue to help Monique Boots and Eric van der Heijden to build up the Groove Unlimited (my record label) stall were we would sell CD's during the day. Unfortunately Ron Boots couldn't be there that day because he had to work in the music store. We really missed Ron, it was actually kind of strange not having him around on a festival like that. But I think we represented Groove Unlimited very well and actually sold quite some CD's. Well especially Monique did that. I didn't sell that much myself, but well no new releases unfortunately. I did have my nice talks with people about my music though.

Both Remy and I also brought a 10 minutes compilation demo of the new collaboration album we are working on. We both announced that on our Facebook pages and I had two people turning up that actually wanted to listen to it. I'm glad some people still read what I'm posting and are even interested in the music as well ;) Thanks guys! Luckily they were both very enthusiastic as well about what they heard so at least two people are looking forward now to the release of the Primitives album :) They both stated that they liked it a lot, but that it was not what they had in mind up front thinking of the combination Remy and Michel. So I guess we did make something very different and special :) Thanks to Hans-Herman Hess by the way for the previous two pictures. I hope he doesn't mind me using them.

During the day I did see some small parts of the concerts and it sounded all very good, but I did go in especially to watch the Space Art concert. I know their music for many years, since it is kind of pre-Jarre music in the 70's electronic music style. It was great to see these guys having so much fun on stage. They even did two encores after the audience just didn't want to let them leave. Remy Stroomer took a picture of me with the Space Art crew together. It was a real joy for me to meet Dominique Perrier again.

All in all I really had a great time! Even though I was exhausted on the end of the day. I was so glad that I had a hotel in the area and didn't have to drive back home. I would like to thank the whole Electronic Circus crew and especially Hans-Herman, Frank, Mike and Lutz for a really great day! I hope you will continue this festival next year. I'll reserve a spot in my agenda for it :)

Nature in the USA Holiday Post

This is the last post in my series about our holiday. So far I posted a lot of technical things, but we also saw a lot of the nature in the US on our road trips. On the left you can see me filming something very special. We were on our way actually to the beach in Clearwater FL when we came to a stop in a traffic jam. There were a lot of people that pulled their car over to look at something in the water. We decided to do the same and get out of the car. At first it look like there was a whale stranded or something from the distance. So we decided to walk over there and have a look.

When we came closer though we saw that it were manatees. We could not figure out what there we doing do. At a certain moment a marina biologist arrived and he told us that these manatees were mating. A rare sight that even the locals stopped their cars for. I filmed the whole thing for a while and together with the manatees we filmed at Manatee Cove I might have enough material for another Synth.nl promotional video.

We have seen a lot of other things too, but I can't share them all on here, but this one I just had to show you. We visited the Shenandoah Caverns in Virginia. A really spectacular place to visit. The caves it itself are beautiful already, but they really outdid themselves with the lighting of the caves. It is hard to capture it on camera since it is so dark and photographing with flash spoils the mood, but I think this pictures gives a good idea.

And then of course we saw a lot of alligators. You just can not miss them in Florida. We did visit the Gatorland park in Florida, which is very nice, but this picture on the right was actually taken by my wife in the pond right next to our holiday house. I think it is a great picture that shows why you don't want to go for a swim in the open water over there. The alligators are literally everywhere. Well enough about the alligators for now.

We also had a less pleasant up close encounter with the wildlife of Florida right at our house. Unfortunately there we had some cockroaches in the house that even pest control couldn't really get rid of. Every day we encountered a few of them, not very nice to have in your house I can tell you, but I guess that comes with the heat and humidity as well. Last year we didn't see any though. Well enough about that too. All in all we had a very nice holiday to look back on and even though we did a lot, we also had some time to relax like enjoying the beach in Clearwater under a parasol. And now. Back to work ;)

Nascar and more nice car stuff

Some of you know that I'm a big car enthousiast. I like anything that goes fast :) When we were planning our trip to the USA I started looking if there was any racing going on near the places we were going to visit and it turned out there was. We were going to drive right past Indianapolis and there was a Nascar race there with still enough tickets available. So we decided to plan our trip to Detroid around this date. I never saw any American racing before and was very exited to go there.

When we finally got there we found out immediately that we actually didn't know much about Nascar at all. There are two main competitions at the same time. The Nation Wide Cup and the Sprint Cup. Same idea but different engines. Qualifying is about the highest speed. The noise is very very different for European racing. It was great to  be at the Indy Speedway. You can feel the historic atmosphere at this circuit and the Americans do know how to make a show of course. In the picture on the right you can see a lot of press gathering around Danica Patrick, a female driver that later crashed her car. We had great seats and even the wife and kids seem to enjoy them selves after they got some ear protection.

After the visit to Nascar we drove on to our friends in Michigan. They live in a small city called Brighton and it turns out that during the summer they have their own local car show EVERY Sunday. The whole center of the town is filled with special cars. Most of them are custom build with very proud owners showing them of. Most of them don't only have done a lot of work on the exterior and interior of the car but also the engines. A lot of them were totally chromed! Amazing. And most of them also installed engine tuning to get the engine power to amazing numbers. The whole atmosphere was so relaxed there with even live music and a lot of stalls to eat. Amazing they do that EVERY Sunday :)

But they had an even bigger surprise in stock for us. Our friend works in the car industry and know a lot of people. One of them has a very big car collection called the 'Lingenfelter Collection' and we got a private tour there. There are about 150 cars there and they are all very special. Some custom build, but also my two favorite Ferrari super cars were standing next to each other there :) I knew most of the European cars in there especially the Italian ones. But we learned a lot about the early Corvettes, Camaros, Fords etc. The nice thing was also that the guy that did the tour knew every detail about all those cars and it was a joy to listen to a real enthusiast like that. Well that was it for now. I took a lot of pictures of course, but we also filmed a bit, so maybe you'll see some clips on YouTube in the future as well.

Back to Kennedy Space Center

I promised some more about our holiday, well one of my highlights was another visit to the Kennedy Space Center. We were there last year, but I forgot to film some things so we decided to go back and also do another tour. When we finally arrived I realized though that I forgot my camera! How stupid is that? It was an 1,5 drive so too far to go back for it and we had a tour planned that left right when we got there. Fortunately we had an Iphone 4S with us that has quite a good camera so we used that, but I was quite upset when we arrived. Well that was the only negative thing so let's go on. Here is a picture of me standing in the rocket garden. A really nice place where you can see some real size models of the Gemini and Mercury rockets.

Another reason I wanted to go back is that they had a new tour that was only available for a limited time. We could visit the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) that NASA used to assemble the Saturn V rockets during the Apollo program and also all the Space Shuttles. We had seen the building from far away a couple of times but never up close. It is not difficult to spot it by the way since it is 160 meters high. The whole Saturn V rocket could stand in it straight up on its mobile launch pad with the crawler vehicle beneath it. So we booked this tour and went on our way.

The size of the VAB is amazing. You can't even take a picture of it up close. I tried it, but couldn't get far enough away. The picture you see above was taken from the bus. Around the VAB is also a lot of nice stuff. One of the crawlers was out there and also the mobile launch platform and parts of the tower. But the nicest part of this tour was that we could not only watch on the outside, but we could also go INSIDE! That was very special for me. There was a lot of security, but we understood later why. There were already parts in there from the new Orion rocket NASA is developing. In 5 years this rocket must be ready and will be about the size of the Saturn V. It will take us back to the Moon and it will go to Mars (hopefully).

Inside the VAB was another big surprise. The actual Atlantis Space Shuttle that made the last flight when we were in Florida last year was there! We saw it land and now we could see it up close and inside the VAB :) A sight not many people will ever see again I guess. The Atlantis Space Shuttle will stay at Kennedy Space Center and will be on display in the future in a special building that are creating now, but for the time being it will be here. Also the van that they have used since the Apollo program to transport the astronauts to the launch pad was in there.

After the VAB visit we went on to the famous Launch Pads 39A and 39B where all the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions launched from. The whole Space Shuttle tower was still there from the last mission. We were really close there, but I chose this picture because I liked it with the train tracks in front of it. All in all it was a great tour. Last night when we were home we watched the movie Apollo 13 again with the kids so that they could put it all in perspective. Well I also have enough film material now to make a nice video from our two visits. So keep your eye our on YouTube.

Back from 4 week Holiday in the USA

We just got back from a 4 week holiday in the USA. We did quite a tour starting and ending in Florida. We stayed in the Florida area for 2 weeks, then we drove all the way up to the Detroit area in Michigan to visit some friends who live there were we stayed for a couple of days and drove back again. We crossed 11 States in total and did a LOT of nice things during this holiday. Too much for one post and  I only want to share the special stuff with you, but even then it won't fit in one post, so more will follow after this.

It all started with the flight from Amsterdam to Orlando. 10 hours of flight, seems boring, but it always gives me some time to listen to some music. Normally I hardly ever have time for that. Arriving in Orlando we picked up a car we rented for the whole stay and drove it to the house we rented for the whole stay. A very nice house I must say with a pool in the garden and also a pool table in the garage :) This would be our permanent base for  the whole holiday even though we knew we were going on a road trip for a couple of days. We didn't know exactly how long though and this way we could leave some stuff behind so that we didn't have to bring all of our luggage on the road trip where we would hop from hotel to hotel.

We did a lot in the Florida area like Sea World (yes again) the kids just love that, but we also visited Disney's Animal Kingdom, Gator Land Kennedy Space Center. We had lots of nice lunches and dinners and yes we gained a few pounds. The US is not a good place to go on a diet I guess ;) At least not for us. On the road trip we also visited some nice places like Dinosaur World, the Shanadoah Caverns, The Indianapolis Speedway, and of course our good friends Jay and Michelle who also took us on some nice trips. I'll go into more details on some of this stuff in the follow up posts :) It was all too much to remember even.

The last picture for this post that I wanted to share with you is the one on the right. This is what happens if you put 4 computer nerds on a road trip and they arrive in a hotel. Yes batteries flat on all the nerd devices. So in immediate power surge and then you can go to sleep until the batteries are charged again. My daughters missed their grand parents a lot, so they skyped with them almost every day. Even from the car. They even had internet in the car through a mobile WiFi hotspot we got with a prepaid 4G mobile card. But the little nerds complaint from time to time of course that it was too slow ;) A well I'm glad that we are back home again, but we had a great holiday. And I'll tell you some more about at least my highlights in some follow up posts.

Garden Party 2012 Report

Recently I visited the Garden Party in Hamm Germany that was organized by the crew of Electronic Circus. It is one of the nicest event in the year I think. Very cozy and a very informal atmosphere whith a BBQ, drinks and some Electronic Music. This year I also had another job. Some of the artists (like Glenn Main in the picture on the left) were traveling light and asked me to bring some equipment for them. I brought my Roland GAIA for Glenn and also my Yamaha AN1X for Rene Splinter.

In the picture on the right you see Rene Splinter playing and my AN1X on the bottom. Also Stephan Schällmann used my synths in his performance as TAX5. They all played a very nice concert that I enjoyed a lot. Normally I like to  stay late on these kind of events but around 23:00 I got really tired and decided to drive back. This was maybe a bad idea and I could better have looked for a hotel. I still had a 2 hour drive a head of me and I really struggled to stay awake on the way back. Actually it was a bit dangerous. So next time I really should arrange for a hotel.

But besides that I really enjoyed this years event again to the fullest. The weather was great, people were nice and the food was good. If you never visited this event I'd really recommend you to put it on your calendar for next year. I want to thank the Electronic Circus crew for organizing such a great event. I'd also like to thank Phil Booth for providing these pictures. I seem to always forget to take pictures. OK next event will be the Electronic Circus in Gütersloh Germany on the 22th of September 2012. Also a great event not to be missed. Maybe I'll see you there :)

Video Synth.nl Visits Cooter Pond 2011

In 2011 we visited Florida in the USA for our holiday. During one of our trips my wife spotted a very nice pond at the side of the road that turned out to be full of life. We spend quite some time there watching all the animals. I took my video camera with me and shot some footage that I turned into this video. The music you hear is a track called 'Chelonia' from my 2009 album OceanoGraphy. More information on the album here: http://www.synth.nl/OceanoGraphy. I made the intro and 3D CD animation in Cinema 4D. I hope you enjoy it.

Synthforum Studio Warming Party

Last weekend I attended a very nice party that my friend Matthijs organized to celebrate the opening of his new studio. I met Matthijs on the Dutch Synthforum.nl website when I joined there in 2005. He was one of the people that inspired me and gave me tips when I first started making music back then. It was great weather so we actually spend more time in the garden where the BBQ and drinks were than in the studio. It was nice to see some of the other guys as well that I met back then and still speak to occasionally in the Synthforum chat room. My friend Hans Landman also joined a bit later and unfortunately I had to leave early because my brother was celebrating his 40th birthday and of course I couldn't miss that either. I hope we can repeat this kind of meeting again in the future. I had a great time. Matthijs thanks for organizing and you have a great studio!

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 :)

E-Day 2012 Aftermath

Some days just fly by like they happened in a blink of an eye. E-Day 2012 was one of those days. I planned to do so much, but eventually I spend the whole day talking to a lot of people and even missed the first two concerts because of that. The only downside was that I mostly talked to people that already have all my music, so I only sold 2 CD's during the whole day, but well the talks were nice and at least I could tell those people that there is new music on the way. I told them that the collaboration CD with Remy is planned for October (if we make it) so that next time I'll have something new on my stall at E-live. And I also told them that I was going to leave for Denmark the next day on a holiday together with Ron Boots and both our families and some synthesizers, so something new might come out of that as well.Thanks to Remy Stroomer by the way for the picture :) I'll update you soon on the weekend with Ron Boots.

Mobile Studio for upcoming Collaboration ......

As some of you might already know, I'm currently working on a collaboration album together with Remy Stroomer. Progress on that project is going well and we hope to release that album later this year. I'll update you on that when there is more certainty. There is another collaboration coming up though. You might remember that in 2010 I released a collaboration album together with Ron Boots called 'Refuge en Verre'. The album was the result of a long weekend in a rented house together with both our families in the Belgian Ardennes. Well we are going to repeat that soon. In the picture is the stuff that I will be bringing along, so a notebook with Cakewalk Sonar installed, a Clavia Nord Wave and the Roland SH-101 and I heard Ron will bring his Korg Kronos. So we'll have a nice set to work with. We are going to improvise there just like last time and if it works out, who knows :) I'll keep you posted. I'm really looking forward to this holiday and also to playing together with Ron Boots again :) More information on 'Refuge en Verre' can be found here: http://www.synth.nl/Refuge

Synth.nl stall at E-day 2012

Coming Saturday there is the yearly E-day festival that my record label Groove Unlimited organizes every year. I will be present there with a stall, where you can buy all my CDs. There are also a lot of other artists present with their own stalls. Groove Unlimited has a big stall where you can buy all kinds of Electronic Music on CD. There are also 3 very nice concerts so all in all a very enjoyable day for Electronic Music fans. The event is held at Theater 'de Enck' in Oirschot in The Netherlands (near Eindhoven). You can find more information on this festival on http://www.e-live.nl/ I hope to see you there!

Synth.nl visits Sea World 2011 Video

This video was initially made for a lecture at school of my youngest daughter about the Killer Whale (Orcinus Orca). On my OceanoGraphy album I also did a track about this magnificent animal called 'Orcinus'. I put that track under this video. I decided to put this video online to promote my OceanoGraphy album that was released in 2009 by Groove Unlimited.



Last summer we visited Sea World in Florida USA with the whole family. I wanted to show these magnificent animals to my kids, of course I'd rather have shown them in the wild, but that is almost impossible. I shot all the video with a little mobile camera from the audience. I made the animations in Cinema 4D. More information on OceanoGraphy here: http://www.synth.nl/OceanoGraphy

Synth.nl visits Electronic Circus 2011

Last weekend I visited the Electronic Circus Festival (EC) in Gutersloh Germany. I went there this time together with fellow musician and friend Remy Stroomer. Every year the EC team organizes a nice pre-festival dinner with the artists and we decided to go there this year as well, so we already arrived on Friday. We had a very nice dinner at a Greek restaurant were I met some familiar faces but also some new ones. Next to the EC team (Hans Herman Hess in the picture with me on the left) I had some time to talk Glenn Main Hendriksen, Bernard Poulard and Steen Chorchendorff Jørgensen. After the dinner I went to a small pub together with Remy Stroomer and we concluded this nice evening.

The next day we went to the circus early and we arrived about the same time as Ron Boots from Groove Unlimited. We helped Ron unloading all his stuff and started to build up the stall from where both Groove and myself sold CD's during the day. In the picture you see Ron in the middle, his wife Monique on the left and myself on the Right. When the stall was ready I had the pleasure to meet Michel Huygen who is also known as Neuronium. We had some very nice talks during the day and we are still in touch even after the festival now. It is always great to meet a lot of interesting people during a day like this. Also Gandalf was present and I did meet him, but there was not much time to talk for me. Later on the day I agreed to play a little video I made for the promotion of my album and I wanted to test this on the beamer that the Wave World guys brought a long.

It was nice to meet these guys as well and the funny thing is that Gert van Santen actually lives a few hundred meters from my house and I met him there for the first time. I had a lot of trouble to get the beamer working and in the end it turned out that the HDMI cable was broken. Luckily the Wave World guys brought their own cable and we could fix it. Glenn Main Hendriksen didn't have anything with him with HDMI though so we agreed that I would play his video and backing track from my notebook. He gave a great concert I think and luckily my notebook didn't give any trouble. I must admit that I was quite nervous for that. I also saw part of the Wave World concert later on. Great to see how these guys go all the way with costumes and make-up and everything. Great show.

Then it was time for my video. Unfortunately the timing was not great for that. People already had to wait a long time before the Picture Palace Music concert was starting. Also they build up a big modular wall in front of the screen. Ah well. I was happy that it played and I hope someone will look up my album because of it. I even did sell some CD's after the concerts were over which is quite unusual. I will play it again at the E-live festival on a better moment I hope. But the disaster stroke for me. I agreed with Thorsten Quaeschning to start their video on the laptop that was next to mine. And then something awful happened. After switching over the HDMI cable to their laptop, it all looked fine, but when I pressed play after Thorsten did his count down the video player just crashed and the video froze. :( I felt very bad at the moment, but we just could't get it to work anymore. We rebooted the notebook and there was even a password on there. Luckily Thorsten was cool about it and came down from the podium to fix it himself and they just played on like nothing happened. So this last hour was a bit stressful for me to be honest. Luckily the concert was great and there was an after party with some beers to relax again.

All in all I had a really great day. Thanks a lot to everyone involved in the organization of this marvelous event and to all the nice people I talked to during both the dinner and the event itself. It is surely a day to remember. Too bad these days always fly by. I'll be back for sure next year! Now I'm looking forward to the E-live festival on the 15th of October! Maybe I'll see you there?

Synth.nl visits Formula 1 Spa 2011

When you follow me for a while you might know by now that I have a passion for motor sports. I always watch every Formule 1 race on TV and one every year I try to visit a race, but the last time was already way too long ago. So last weekend I went to the Belgium Grand Prix together with a table tennis buddy who also loves Formula 1. I was at the Spa circuit before visiting the 24 hours of Spa, but never saw a Formula 1 race there actually, but it is always one of my favorite races in the season.

Since it rains a lot in this area at this time of the year, we decided to get some tribune seats that would keep us dry. Here is a picture on me and Ton on the right taken by a nice fellow Dutchman that was sitting next to us. But even though we hoped for rain, since that gives the most spectacular races, it stayed dry all the time. It had rained the day before though and that meant anyway that everything was covered in mud very quickly also the parking area was quite slippery.

We were sitting in a very nice spot along the track as well. We were right at the famous bus-stop chicane. There the cars arrive at full speed and they have to break very hard then to accelerate onto the straight again. And I don't believe how close to the track we were siting, no more than 50 meters I guess between us and the cars. I still love the noise these cars produce even though I put in ears plugs to protect my ears a bit.

We could also see the cars entering the pit lane right in front of us. Which is important to know he is in the lead or not, since the whole order is shaken up when the pit stops start. But luckily as well we had a very big TV screen right in front of us just across the track so we could follow the race very well and also see what happened on other parts of the track. The only downside was that there was a big fence in between us and the track. I brought my video camera as well and planned to film just like I did in Le Mans, but unfortunately that was not very successful. So no video this time, maybe next time. All in all I had a great day and a necessary little break again from the music of my Apollo album. But today I'm back in the studio working on the last bits and pieces. I actually must have the music ready by the end of this week, so time is running out. But don't worry I'm almost there. The finish line is in sight :)