Synth.nl Biography

I think that when you listen to music, it is nice to know who you are listening too, so I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself and how I got to producing my music eventually. My name is Michel van Osenbruggen and I was born in the netherlands in 1969. So at the time of writing I'm 40 years old. I still live there. I really like this country though it is becoming a bit busy sometimes. I'm happily maried with my wife Marina and we have two lovely daughters called Joyce and Tamara. I studied Electronics at school and worked for several years in a company that sold, repaired and installed computers and networks etc. I repaired a lot of Commodore 64's and Amiga 500's in the first few years and later specialized in installing and managing Novell networks. The last years I developed software in Visual Basic for that company. So I became a really allround engineer. The company still exists but in a smaller form since the owner made his job from his hobby too (helicopter flying). If you are interested: www.bird.nl (Only Dutch, sorry) In 1983 I watched the movie WarGames. In this movie a guy dials in with his modem to a super computer and allmost starts World War III, but he thinks he is playing a game. A really cool movie. Watch it if you have the chance it is still good. After watching this movie I became fascinated with data communications. I bought a modem and after visiting several Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). I decided to start my own BBS. My BBS was called Falcon BBS and was all about planes back then. People could dial in with their modem to this system and download files, read news bulletins and chat. It was all Very primitive compared to the Internet as we know it now, but well that didn't exist back then right ;) We also had a mailsystem called Fidomail. Sending an E-mail to Australia took about 8 days ;) Finnaly in 1994 this BBS was hooked up to the Internet. Actually my BBS still exists for nostalgic sake. If you are interested in how things worked in that time look at: www.falconbbs.nl So from my fascination of data communications and the Internet in 1996 a real company evolved from the BBS. Together with my business partner Henk we started with really nothing. The company is called BIT BV and we are now one of the larger business ISP's in the Netherlands. Our specialities are webhosting and colocating. We operate three own datacenters in the Netherlands and operate our own dark fiber network with multiple 10 Gbit links to the outside world. So if you are interested look at www.bit.nl (Only Dutch, sorry). From my interest electronics I also started to look for another thing to do with electronics besides data communications and that became producing sound. My good friend Jaap introduced my to synthesizer music by Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis and I was instantly fascinated by that. So in 1991 I started collecting synthesizers and fiddled around with them when I had some spare time which was not a lot. I just tweaked sounds on them and sometimes played a tune, but never recorded anything. I actually have no real musical background. I only had a year of organ lessons when I was 10 or so, but I didn't care for that back then so I quit. I didn't like the music I had to play and I didn't like reading notes (still can't by the way). Finally in October 2005 something bad happened after working way to much and to long. I suffered a burnout. I cannot recommend that to anyone. I didn't work for about half a year to recover from this and in this period I was advised to find a way to distract myself from not working and to relax. So I decided to fire up the synths and actually start producing music. I had no idea where to start though. I started to look on the Internet for advice and finnaly found the Dutch website www.synthforum.nl. A very nice site about synths and a lot of people who use them. On this website I found a lot of information and met some really nice people that helped me on my way. After a few experiments I decided to go for a dream I allways had, but thought was never possible. I started to produce my own music and actually started working on my first album. And now it is there :) So eventually the bad times lead to something good. In 2007 I also met Ron Boots of Groove Unlimited. Groove sells a lot of Electronic Music on their website www.groove.nl, but they also are a record label specialized in Electronic Music. I met with Ron Boots in his Studio and let him listen to my music. He was enthousiastic right away and I signed a record contract with Groove Unlimited. I was estatic about this, not about making money, because that is not why I make music, but because they have a big audience. I really like to share my music and love the idea that people all over the world listen to it. I really love producing my own music as it takes me to another world every time. And the great thing is I can create this world myself and dream about it. I try not to immitate anyone and produce my own style, but I'm surely influenced by the 80's synthesizer music that I listened to so much. I just hope to sound a bit more moderner. Artists I really like and that have influenced me for sure are: Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Kitaro, Art of Noise, Kraftwerk, Jan Hammer, Hanz Zimmer, Alan Parson Project, Orbital, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics My alltime big hero is Jean-Michel Jarre. I visited four of his concerts and the best one was the Aero concert in Denmark. In 2009 I finally met him in person in Amsterdam. We had a nice chat and I gave him my 'AtmoSphere' CD. He promised me to listen to it. So I hope that he will keep that promise. I would be really honored if he would listen to my music even just once. So what about the future? I hope to produce many more albums and improve myself in my music. I would also like to do work in surround so maybe a DVD with some visuals in the future. I would also love to do music for documentaries or movies. That would be my ultimate goal. So do I have more fascinations? Yes a lot :) You will learn about my other fascinations through my future albums so keep track of them :)