Biography

Venja brings together the extremes of musical tradition.
The computer technology of the high-tech era together with the soft timbre of classically trained female singers. The two are finely balanced. When anyone accuses the creators of electronic music that their sounds are subdued and bizarre, Venja can teach them the error of their ways. Even though this musician considers himself to be a syntheziser purist.
Venja lives in the eastern part of Belgium and has an education into digital technologies and so he build his first intruments himself. The millions of sounds which he can entice out of these instruments fascinate him and fill him with enthusiasm. This is the raw material for his “sound painting” much simular to the paint which painters place on their palettes.
“Combining sounds in the right way, i.e. using them in the right context and breathing live into them, this is what puts the harmony into my music”, he says.
Oliver Steeger, Bonn

At age of fourteen VENJA started to make his first compositions.
The guitar was the first instrument he got interested in. Later on he became a keyboard player and played in several bands, of which Another Season was the best known band locally.
A few years later he started to build his own recording studio and began to make music on a solo basis. In 1987 this resulted in his first release Modesty;  at that time indeed a modest release. Later on he became better known thanks to his concerts in several planetaria and other big events such as the Fractal Waves Festival and KLEMdag.
Since the release of Cashmere Moon, 40% of the Venja tracks are songs, in which Reinhilde Weytjens is taking care of the vocals, the rest of the songs are instrumental. Regularly other musicians are invited, such as there are Bas B. Broekhuis (percussion and drums) and Erwin Geens (bass guitars).
IC/Digit Music, the world finest label for New Instrumental Music, offered Venja to release his music. This already lead to the release of five CD's:
Cashmere Moon, A Dash of Soul, Floating Silence, Rapture and his newest album Curves.
The music on Floating Silence is the soundtrack for the "Floating Silence" health center in Antwerp.
A Dash of Soul can best be described as a kind of ambient music: it takes you from one surprise into another, it's deep, it's wide: a trip through mysterious worlds.
The album Rapture!, was put together to celebrate 10 years of Venja-music: live tracks from planetaria concerts and music of other events. It's gracious, vast, threatening and infinite... Rapture! surely is his most quiet album ever; almost no drums or percussion sounds were used.
Curves is Venja's newest and perhaps most exciting album. Listen to it without pausing from the first until the last minute and you'll notice time has passed by quickly...


TV-Limburg:
In March 1997 TV-Limburg made out a competition "LimboMania" for a new TV- tune.
Venja came out first!! Since then Venja made many tunes for TV and commercials.
 

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