june 18, 2001

Concentrix

My name is Björn Vande Vijvere, 24 years old and I live in Belgium in a town called Ingelmunster. I've got a few friends around with who I throw psychedelic parties a few times a year.
As a musician I started off at 16 playing electric guitar in a rock band. After that I've been through some different kinds of music, such as grunge, metal, hardcore, reggae, a bit of jazz and psychedelic rock music such as Ozric Tentacles (who were the main reason why I got into psychedelic music. The first trance-album I heard was Twisted from Simon Posford (and I still is one of my favourites).

About 6 years ago I started a bit experimenting with making music on my Comodore Amiga. Later I bought a CS1X, and started learning about MIDI and soundsynthesis. About two years ago now I met a guy from Tielt, Filip Vansteenkiste who really liked what I was doing (that time Concentrix still was two people, Christophe Pareit and myself). Filip had the plans of setting up an electronic music lable, but still was a bit wondering about what direction to go. When I hit him with the Psychedelics he started evolving more and more to the trance-music. For now we've gathered about 6 Belgian musicians who are doing trance music and we're planning an releasing a compilation of these bands verry soon now. For the Concentrix we're also planning a full album release by the end of the summer. There will be part trance on it, but also a part triphop, a part dub and some funny experimental stuff.

Concerning trance parties, I love to do live gigs on them, putting up the entire studio on the stage. I don't want to play from DAT or 16-track because I wan't to have full control over the music. During the gig I want the music to be some kind of an organic part of myself and for that you need to be able to turn every sound manipulating knob. It's been quite some time now since I've been doing a live gig. Most of the time I'm DJ-ing at parties. Live-acts aren't so current on parties here in Belgium, since the scene is still verry young. But seeing that musicians are starting to get interested towards it is verry promisin

I think that's about there is to tell about myself.