VSQ Performs Lana Del Rey

Ride

Los Angeles, California serves as home base for the concept group called Vitamin String Quartet. The group is made up of studio musicians who are brought together to interpret and record orchestra style covers of music from all types of genres ranging metal, techno, country, pop, rock and hip-hop dance music. While the quartet uses a wide assortment of artists and instruments, one fairly constant member of the group is violinist Tom Tally. Tally has been intimately involved in the composing, arranging and conduction of many songs on approximately 50 of the albums that have been recorded by the group. While the group is referred to as a string quartet, the reality is that more individuals are usually involved, using instruments such as violins, cellos, percussion, brass and woodwinds. The group was originally brought together in 1999 as an experimental project. They wanted to determine the effects of using classical style instruments to create new and different sounds on popular recordings. Early on, the FM broadcast station WWHK in Concord, NH would play the group's music 24 hours a day, every day, for a period of time. The popularity of the group's music has led to the music being featured on TV and in the movies. Credits include So You Think You Can Dance (2008), TV show The Vampire Diaries (2010), the 100th episode of Gossip Girl and the fifth season finale of Modern Family (2014). Throughout the years, the group has been involved in the recording of over 200 different albums. In 2009, the group stepped out of the box a bit and recorded some original material provided by some of the various musicians on the album Per_Versions.

Oxytronix music is a mixture of warm and screaming synthesizer sounds with deep shattering drum beats accompanied by emotional and melancholic melodies. He was born 1974 near Zurich. He started his music career with a violin. He was forced by his mother until she realized that he has no talent for the violin. Because of his struggles in school and the problems in his family he discovered electronic music as an escape from his difficult childhood reality. His parents refused to pay him piano lessons or to buy him a synthesizer after the violin experience.

Influenced by Jean Michel Jarre and Vangelis, he startet to experiment with his Amiga 500, a little monophonic Casio toy keyboard and some feedback effects from his boombox and the microphone. A friend inspired him to start guitarplaying, but he lost himself in experimenting around with the weird sounds of his new zoom digital effect processor, that was also used by Nine Inch Nails at this time. But his experimental music never succeeded in front of bigger audiences then, so he decided disappointed to quit making music.

After long absence from music he discovered the albums of Mercan Dede as a cure for his emotional struggles while his divorce. The mystical music of Dede brought him back to music making. He started to play the traditional reed flute of the sufis called Ney and mastered his craft by taking lessons from Suleyman Erguner, the brother of Kudsi Erguner who played the oriental Flute part in the original piece Revolutions from Jarre. A deep crisis in his life, after loosing his son, lead him to making some spiritual ambient music and he published some meditation music singles.

After his recovery he produced two instrumental Trap and Downtempo albums. Inspired from his record collection and the older albums of the Boards of Canada, he found back to his electronic music roots and published in 2017 the four Albums Oxipop, Micronox, Darkness and Night Shift on his own independent label Kanakland Records. His music is influenced by the electronic music pioneers from Jarre over Enya up to newer musicians like Leftfield and Lorn. His music is also inspired from classic composers like Beethoven, Bach and the classical Ottoman music.

His deep yearning for spirituality and his melancholy had always a big influence to the music of Oxytronix.