Quazar

As producer, writer, promotor and radio DJ, Gert van Veen has been a keyplayer in the Amsterdam housescene since day one: the Amsterdam Summer of love of 1988.

Van Veen was part of the first wave of Amsterdam producers who started recording electronic dancemusic in small homestudios and releasing them on independent local labels. Pay the piper (1989), produced with Corne Bos and DJ Eddy de Clercq under the name A-men, was the first Amsterdam housetrack to become a solid dancefloor-hit in the legendary Roxy club.

A year later van Veen scored his first international clubhit with House Of Venus Dish & Tell - a big succes for the new Go Bang!-label, four months later followed by a record that would become a milestone in the history of Amsterdam techno: Seven stars by Quazar.

Quazar was the first Dutch dance-act to take its studio-equipment onto the stage, performing live during extensive tours from 1991-1993 and since then playing on almost all main events, from the first MysteryLand, Lowlands and Dance Valley to Love Parade, I love techno and many more.

In 2006 Quazar is going to celebrate its 15th anniversary with another live tour and the release of its seventh album 3006.

Although music already was a full time activity in these early years, van Veen always kept his daytime job too: writing about music for the dayly newspaper de Volkskrant, for which he became a specialist of the burgeoning new dancemusic. A collection of inside-stories about the house scene written for de Volkskrant, was published in 1994 under the name Welcome to the future.

Welcome to the future also was the name van Veen chose for the parties that the Quazar posse organised in the Amsterdam Paradiso (first event: december 1993 with live-acts from Dutch producer-friends Orlando Voorn and Speedy J, second event: Underworld live) and that would become one of the longest running events in the history of Amsterdam house.

In 2000 van Veen left de Volkskrant to be able to focus on his other projects, especially producing, playing live and promoting partys. Yet he returned to journalism two years later when he helped set up the music section of the new ID&T Magazine, for which he is now music editor.

In 2004, after having finished a second book, The history of ID&T - about the 10 year history of Hollands biggest party-organiser ID&T (Mysteryland, Innercity, Sensation) - he expanded the Welcome to the future-concept to a new format: a weekly radioshow on ID&T Radio, hosted with Olaf Boswijk. Now this show is taken a step further with the weekly 7 hour-party/radioshow in Studio 80.

In february 2005 Gert van Veen was awarded his second Lifetime Achievement Award at the Gouden Kabouter Awards in Paradiso in Amsterdam.