This is a picture of us in Studio 901 ... Our mothers (Els and Maaike de Graaf) are sisters, which causes us to be cousins. We are Julius Thyssen & Hens Zimmerman, names you might know from radioshows and software, from disco-dance (re-)mixes that rule(d) the airwaves, or maybe even from weird books and magazines...
It must have been a rainy abba-ish day in 1975 when we noticed there were many mutual interests. We laughed our asses off about things like letting a märklin-miniature train drive off of its railway-tracks. Such toys never knew where we removed some railway-parts from its tracks, and so the trains would stop slipping on the floor, there was no power to run on anymore. We had let the train escape from its own fuel source (the electric rails)! GEEK ALERT! It marked the start of 2 cousins driven to find loop-holes and back-doors in everything they got their hands on. Pretty soon it felt like we became a menace to society each time we were together during school-holidays. The world was lucky: Our parents didn't live in the same town...
Ever since our first idiotic tape-recordings (we recorded virtually everything on several hundreds of tapes!) and our first turntables we've been more or less embracing new technologies. We vividly remember the days one of us had 'accidently' nicked his first battery-operated computer-like game from a store, it was on a holiday in Switzerland (hey sorry, they sold them with idiotic tourist-tax-rates), the Tomytronic it was called. Wow, it had a Liquid Chrystal Display (we're talking 1978 here)!
We typically had this thing about wanting to open every machine the day we got our hands on it. We discovered tricks to make the alarm-beeps on our first quartz-watches the loudest of both our schools :-) Very often we added some features to machinery that nobody else understood or appreciated; Folks at school and parents were always amazed by that: "How could you break it open and totally ruin the plastic, it was brand new for god's sake!?"
I guess you could say we were very unusual school-boys to say the least. Geeky yet cool, always busy thinking and never drunk. In our teens we never did dopey things, hell no, our experiments were more in the line of fireworks exploding in closed suitcases while sitting on them and things like that.
We also - both in separate ways - got in touch with radio and music at a very early age. At a certain time we both had our own illegal FM-transmitter at home. Later on we've used these to publish home-made musical projects and break into cable-radio systems. So.. music like this, writing like this and software like this had to come from our brains...
Here you see us trying something..
chances are we weren't allowed to...
Julius
(last updated 1999) PC-screens seen by Julius
As I look at my life so far, one could say I hacked my way through. Always looking for improving ways to do new things, hoping for real things to happen to me. And boy, did they. I've had a very strange but full life until now. Seems to me the best is still to come.
I'm the guy everybody knows will never commit suicide. I'd say my drives in most things I do are evolutionary, reproductional, or related to finding magnificent combinations. Combining, yeah, that's what it's all about, putting things together, trying NOT to break things and trying to make them last. I still wish I could live forever and stay young forever, I hate getting older.
"Where does this guy come from?", you might wonder. Well, I have lived in several places in Holland, among them are Amsterdam (made me sort of streetwise at a very early age), Oosterbeek (a boathouse of my father), Acquoy (sickening amount of apple-trees) and Oldenzaal (near Germany, school and first love 'xperiences'). My father moved to the south of France when I was 10 and my Mother had a lot to do with Russia (not that she is russian). Some things related to all that really messed up my view towards city-life, humanity and planet earth probably, and yet again things brought me to live in the city that does sleep: Amsterdam. I really have to have a steady place to come home to, I think. Otherwise I can't create anything. I like security, clarity and serenity, even in irregular things like music and eh.. women? But mystery is also very cool. I like to drink loads of LapSang tea, fruit juices, and my favourite food is Italian, Spanish, American or Indian, some of my relatives alegedly have that gypsy-like black hair because of their far-away spanish roots.
Speaking of colors: WHY do people use magenta in their pages? Don't they know about colors and their meanings? Strangest thing, I mean, since Red and Blue are the two contrasting colors in R-G-B values, it's asking for trouble when you use just those two mixed in whatever degree possible. So I try to avoid using purple. In addition to that I think I'm often filled with hatred towards the existence of death, sleep, condoms, out-of-control drunks, drug-use, predictable people, large companies, greed and career-moves. Good material always seems to be created by single or small groups of people, with Gaussian blur, at night..
(last updated 1996)
I come from a planet orbiting a distant sun in the Small Magellanic Cloud (conveniently positioned somewhere near Beta Hydri if you look at it from an observation-site on this filthy piss-hole we call Mother Earth). Somehow I never bothered to figure out how the engineers on my home-planet used transdimensional space-bending, so for the time being I guess I'm stuck here.
What Asian Astrology says about us...
About the Fire Horse
Men and women actually born in the year of the Fire Horse
will have the same characteristics as the ordinary Horse -- but they will be more accentuated, in the good qualities as well as in the bad. The Fire Horse will thus be a harder worker, a more cunning individual, more independent, more gifted ... and alas, far more selfish. His passionate nature and the frantic egotism which seizes him will lead him to commit his worst excesses when he is in love. There are those who say that the Fire Horse can be a good influence in the heart of his own family. But popular belief asserts that he will make trouble in the home he was born in just as he does in the one he himself has built. What we do know is that the Fire Horse will have a career that is more varied, more exceptional, more interesting than that of the ordinary Horse. The Fire Horse carries within himself the seeds of fame ... or of notoriety! Chinese tradition also sees the Fire Horse as a special sign entailing either spectacular good luck, or terrible bad luck; they consider that nothing about the Fire Horse occurs in moderation.