Alexander van Kuik

I am Alexander N. van Kuik, painter, poet, and musician. My works as a solo composer and artist are very diverse, ranging from new age ambience to spoken word, and from movie-soundtrack-like piano pieces to straight out folk songs with violin, bodhrán and mouth harp. My thematology mostly concentrates on these invisible things that influence our lives daily, the vile whispers in our heads through politics, the magickal energies that surround us, negative and positive, reincarnation, good and evil, love, meditation. I do not claim my music has "healing vibes" (though if it has, please tell me) but it' still worth a listen, if anything, just to know how another artist thinks about those things...

I was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1988, by a dutch mother, Ariadne Westerkamp, and a Greek father, Ioannis Arvanitis, and lived there for eleven years before moving to Athens, Greece. From a very young age I was sent to a music school to learn violin, but I never had the discipline to be really good at it. Instead, I focused on visual arts. Drawings and scetches were (and are) my specialty. In Greece, at the age of 12 or 13, I discovered a small spark of talent in poetry and rhyme and writing, and started writing many poems and small stories. At a musical high-school in Athens I learned piano and tambouras, while I continued my violin lessons. Those experiences came in handy when I started writing my very first compositions for the epic metal band, Overawe, where I performed the vocals. The band disbanded a year later, but the experiences therein were useful for my second band, this time a gothic rock one, known as Tracing Dawn. I wrote many lyrics for Tracing Dawn. It was a hard time, full of negativity and anger, which inspired me to those lyrics and compositions. The band is active to this day, but somewhere in the beginning of 2005, I started writing my own, autonomous piano piece. I polished it for months until there seemed to be no flaw left to it. In summer 2006 I went to Holland, and went with one of my cousins to a folkmusic festival in Eindhoven, which touched me deeply. The sheer energy of the dance, the simple happiness in the air around, and the prettiest melodies I ever heard. After returning to Greece I bought a bodhran and learned to play. I wrote two new piano pieces, a poem dedicated to my true love, and one electronic ambient piece, , available for download on this site, inspired by Gerlwh, one of the artists of "de Branding".

I do not play live, problem is that record all instruments myself so it's very hard to find people to play with me on stage... By the way, I've only just began working.

I am a big fan of various artists like Loreena McKennitt, Kate Bush, Enya, Yanni, Clannad, Vangelis, Chris Hinze, Lunasa, Afro Celt Sound System, Fiamma Fumana, Faith & the Muse, Enigma, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Pink Floyd, The Legendary Pink Dots, Isao Tomita, Fields of the Nephilim, Pain of Salvation, Killing Joke and many more...

Violin, viola, piano, bodhrán, mouth harp, cubase, synth, vocal chords.