Nope, in Paris at the Bataclan. We're supporting ARCH ENEMY on a short European tour. Last night we played in Amsterdam for some 1500 people. Really nice. Today will be kind of the same. It's really cool we were invited by the Arch Enemies. Thanx.

We have two albums released yet on Listenable Records, Polars (2003) and second one Drawing Circles (2006). In the 6 years we exist we toured and played with MESHUGGAH, DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, MORBID ANGEL, MACHINE HEAD, ALL THAT REMAINS and ARCH ENEMY. We got an incredibly good response from modern Metal fans and the press. This year we'll release our third album Silhouettes.

Silhouettes stands for our shadowside, the side of ourselves that we seldom reflect to. In that perspective the new record is a bit darker compared to Drawing Circles.

As always we took care of the complete production process ourselves: production, mastering, artwork etc. Guitarists Jochem and Bart are real pros and they handled the production of Silhouettes. The main part was done in our own studio Split Second Sound. The drums were done in Excess Studio in Rotterdam, both in Holland.

It was vocalist Eric and bass player Remko who did the artwork. The skull and human figure show the contradiction within our inner self. At our first two albums we also wrote about contradictions - for instance between nurture/nature, dark/light, man/machine. But at that time we always focussed on the more progressive side of the whole thing. This time we focussed on the more dark side.

With Polars we set a musical statement. The album-set up was very unconventional with songs that went from Ambient part to brutal Mathcore parts.

Second album Drawing Circles was built around a lyrical theme. All the songs were connected to each other in this big overlapping wave of tension.

On this third album we focussed on every song specifically. There's no direct connection between every song. The result is that the songs feel more connected to ourselves.

There's not just one way we write songs. Every song is approached differently. Sometimes our vocalist comes up with an idea, like the main part of Messengers. Sometimes our guitarists come up with a bunch of riffs like in To Erase A Lifetime, and sometimes I bring in some ideas like in Laments Of An Icarus. It depends on our mood how we deal with these parts. But it takes some time 'till a song is finished. We're not the kind of band that writes a song in an hour.

Heavy music stretching from Ambient to Mathmetal and everything in between. It's still really hard to describe our own sound, and actually, it's not up to us haha. But ok, it will give you some names. TOOL, Devin Townsend, MESHUGGAH.

Of course it's amazing to play with those bands. Like today we played here in Paris, the crowd went totally mad. We played a lot in France and it's cool to play for a real big audience now. Besides that I think we did a good job for ARCH ENEMY by warming up the audience.

It's not the first time we play with bigger bands. We supported MESHUGGAH, MACHINE HEAD, DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, MORBID ANGEL, ALL THAT REMAINS as well. All very cool bands.

BRUTUS is going to do a few more gigs with another drummer, probably Dutch guy Yuma Van Eekelen. Our guitarist Bart will participate in BRUTUS for those three or four gigs, but he's no band member anymore. Also Eric's project SENGAIA has split up. I guess I'm the only one who has a side project right now. It's called EXIVIOUS and consists of band members of CYNIC, SENGAIA and TEXTURES. Actually it has not much to do with Metal, but more with Fusion and Jazz like Allan Holdsworth and TRIBAL TECH. I think we will release the record by the end of the year.

About Maarten: life was a heavy burden for him most of the time, although he was very interested and excited about a lot of stuff. That's all I want to say actually.

Yes, it does not come from only Metal. In fact most of us don't listen to Metal that much. Guitarist Jochem is very much into old Country nowadays, guitarist Bart is addicted to soundscape master Patrick O Hearn, Richard likes prog. As always, I'm into old Soul music. I think bass player Remko and singer Eric are listening most Metal music of us, although they also listen to a lot of other stuff. You know, we all listened to Metal. All kinds, Black, Death, Math, Doom, Thrash. But when you hear so much music like we did now all boundaries fall away. Music is just music and not specifically Metal, Rock, Fusion or Pop.

The whole PA and Light system shut down in England. It was very funny because it happened in the last 10 second our last song Swandive. The whole crowd was yelling and we were like Damn what's happening because we didn't recognized the problem directly. The monitors were still working. Right after the song was finished the crowd screamed even harder. It was an amazing apotheosis of the show.

Nokia asked us to play in the commercial for the so called Nokia Sound Booth. It's a soundproof phone booth which was supposed to be placed on Rock and Metal festivals. The commercial showed us playing a song with a guy having a telephone conversation in this Nokia Sound Proof. Kinda funny haha.

Silhouettes, check it out. On www.myspace.com/textures or somewhere else.