Pianist Guy Van Nueten could read notes before he could read the letters of the alphabet and since then he has made music. As a teenager, he became interested in pop and rock music and after his studies, he became the frontman of The Sands where he wrote the hit April and June. He then went on to the Conservatory to study composition and harmony. “The piano used to play with me, now I play the piano.”

Van Nueten’s talent is versatile, he has made music for film, dance and theatre, but can also be heard as a performer or arranger on albums by dEUS, Zita Swoon and Admiral Freebee. In autumn 2009, Van Nueten released Merg, a contemporary classical solo album with references to baroque and his hero Johann Sebastian Bach (song titles like; Adagio not in B, Agressie Var.1 and Impro De Vrucht). In 2013 the successor Pacman appeared and this year Contact will be released, completing his solo piano trilogy.

Van Nueten talks about the first record from the trilogy: “Everything is recorded in one go, there is hardly any cutting and pasting, I wanted a snapshot, something authentic and fresh.” With pop music, the recording takes a long time because the music is mostly made in the mixing but I wanted to achieve a purity, a directness. Once you work on a CD for a year, what’s left of it? When I turn on the radio, I hear a lot of things that have been flattened and are creepily perfect. This is one of the reasons I like the music of the sixties and seventies: that music is alive, it’s full of mistakes and the musicians really were in the room together, making music.”