Maarten VX came to electronic music the long way round. Until his early twenties he listened almost exclusively to metal, punk and rock, and spent those years in bands — until Nine Inch Nails and Massive Attack pulled him, more or less by accident, into production and synthesisers. He kept a live musician's instinct for arrangement and dynamics. Strictly, it's electronic music, but it carries the shape and force of a guitar record: melodic and hypnotic, built to rise and break the way a band would play it, for headphones as much as for a dancefloor.

Working from Ghent, he has self-produced a run of EPs since 2021, with airplay on Studio Brussel, Radio 1 and Rinse FM and praise from Focus Knack. He also won the Cellini remix contest hosted by Vi.be and Red Bull Elektropedia. In parallel he built a hardware live set, played on synthesisers and samplers, which has taken him to Ancienne Belgique's Braindance XL alongside Fatima Yamaha and HAAi, Campo Solar, Moonfield Festival and the closing night of Gentse Feesten at Broei — more than twenty shows so far.

His debut album, Songs From The Sun, is out on 4 June 2027. It followed a long break from music — travel through Laos, Thailand and Japan, then a deliberate pause — and six focused months of daily, almost meditative writing sessions.

"When I came back to music, I had this burst of energy and set out to make the record on a strict schedule, writing every day. Then, inside that discipline, something else took over: the songs started arriving on their own. My only job was to stay out of their way. Often it felt like they were written by someone else, from a place I could visit but not control. That's what the album is about: what finally arrives once you stop chasing it."