Interviews:

Interview Sequences Magazine

With favorable comparisons to Vangelis & Jarre to his name, Belgian musician Frank Van Bogaert is certainly a most talented fellow. His latest album "Human" proved to be his best yet which prompted CARL JENKINSON to find out more about him.

2002 was a pretty good year for you, what with the release of your album "Human" & a successful performance at E-Live, you must be pretty pleased with how things have gone.

It’s been a very busy and good year indeed. Reactions on my latest release “Human” have been very positive, in fact I can’t recall having read a negative review somewhere about the album and that pleases me as you never know whether a new release is going to be successfully or not.
I just made sure I was completely happy and satisfied with “Human” before releasing it, so I worked a bit longer on this on, about a year and a half. It seems “Human” is doing better than all of my previous albums, it has yet to outsell “Geographic” but it’s selling faster. Also if I look back at E-live, I’m very pleased. A lot of people got to see and hear me for the first time live and apparently this has only brought me a lot of new fans !
We (my visual team and I) worked very hard to bring a great show at E-live and I believe we succeeded.
The audience was so enthusiastic, even from the beginning of the show that it gave me so much energy that I kind of gave myself to the public and played my b**lls off !

In comparison with your previous albums "Human" seemed to be more varied with a greater range of styles & use of ethnic samples & so on.

Yes, I’m very aware of this. Although the album is very consistent in feeling it is more varied in influences.
You probably already know that I’m also a professional producer and sound engineer and that I own one of Belgium’s busiest recording studio’s ACE near Antwerp.
This means that I’m spending an average of 60 working hours per week in the studio with a great variety of musicians, most of them live-musicians so it is impossible for me not to be influenced by the people I work with. This is also why my music, although it’s definitely electronic music, often has a more acoustic and warmer feel.
In my music you can hear a lot of samples, ethnic or other, that you won’t find on any sample CDs just because they are recorded live here in the studio.
Also I do write a lot of music for radio and TV commercials and this work is of course also influencing my personal music.
Because “Human” is more varied than my previous releases it also appeals to people outside the EM scene even so much that it got a big Belgian record distributor interested and as a result “Human” is now available in the better Belgian record stores.

Were you ever tempted to make "Human" a more acoustic album by using some real ethnic sounds, musicians rather than relying on samples (is this something you might think of doing, either live or in the studio one day?)

There are two tracks on “Human” that involve live musicians. On “Meander” you have Frank De Ruytter’s beautiful sax playing. He’s a great musician I also hire a lot for other productions. I just told him “play what you think you have to play on this track” and it just matched.
By the way, he had never heard of electronic music or let’s say Vangelis’ stuff. The other track “Reunion” features Anthony Boast on the “viola braguesa”. This is a beautifully and very rare Portuguese instrument. It looks and sounds like something between a guitar and a mandolin. Anthony has also recorded some albums here in the studio solely using this instrument, beautiful ambient stuff !
As for all the other ethnic sounds on the album, they are played by myself using the best samples I can get. A big part of my own style is in the way I play these samples. So I don’t think I would get the same result if I would hire in, let’s say a “Dulcimer” or “Turkish Oud “ player.
It looks as if the new album, scheduled for release somewhere next year, will also be made with this in mind. Speaking of the coming album, it will definitely be different to all that I have done before. Up till now, the new tracks that I’m most fond of all have an ambient feel but not comparable to other ambient music. It’s sometimes very ”Claude Debussy“. There are also a few more straight forward EM tracks ready, so for the moment I’m having doubts about releasing a single album. Maybe it should become a double album with one ambient CD and one more EM/Poppy CD. This of course means that I’ll have to work a bit longer on it than scheduled. We’ll see.

Your excellent piano solos at your E-Live gig suggests that you had classical training, is this the case?

No, much better than this, I'm a well trained “pop and rock” musician, meaning that I read fluently chord schemes and know all the different keys by heart, but please don’t put a classical score in front of me !
Of course this way of working means that you’ve got to have a very good memory for melodies as they never got written down so in the studio we always work with chord schemes and if we’re working with classical musicians they get a score printed from our sequencer program.
If I work on a project with a symphonic orchestra, from time to time there’s still a budget to do so, there’s always a conductor involved. Anyway I’m convinced that I wouldn’t be able to compose the kind of music that I do if I would have had a classical training !

I was impressed by your excellent piano solos which you made sure everyone could see on the screens behind you, a little showing off there???

Well, the screens behind me were a big part of the show and yes, they showed me playing live. "Look mama ! I’m using both hands!!"
Anyway, the public loved the fact that there was something to see, more than the usual knob twiddling that you get to see so much at such festivals, and that a guy was playing live piano and synths, this of course intensifies the contact between audience and performer.
As a performer you’re a bit more nervous before you go on stage because of all the mistakes you might make but this also makes sure you’re full of energy. Also, the beauty of playing live is that when you do make a mistake, the public never seems to notice because it all happens so fast.

So going back in time how did you first become interested in music & synthesizers?

I really got interested in music, meaning that buying records was about the most important thing in life, when I was about 12 years old. At that age I also started learning to play the piano by myself and by playing along with records (I had an upright piano in my bedroom, for which I’m still very grateful to my parents).
I will never forget the moment I heard “Albedo 0.39” from a guy named Vangelis (I must have had the age of 14). This record opened up a whole new world to me. At that time I knew about organs but the sounds I was hearing on Albedo came from another kind of instrument called a ”Synthesizer”.
I wasn’t even sure whether they where keyboard instruments or just ”panels full of knobs”. I just wanted to have a “synthesizer” !

It's evident that Vangelis was & is a major influence on you?

I admit owning about every release he has ever done!!
I don’t try to hide that influence in my music because there is so much more influenced input in my work,that I’m not afraid coming to close to his work.
I have developed my own trade mark.
I think the main thing I share in my music with that of the Greek master is the love for big and warm synth sounds,great melodies and above all that the music is produced as professionally as possible.