Interview: Uri Dijk (Textures)

Interview: 14th January 2025

Ahead of the release of Genotype (review here) Textures' first album in nine years, I spent some time talking to keyboard player Uri Dijk.

Hotel Hobbies: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. How are you?

Uri Dijk: Very good! I read your review today. Thank you so much for the kind words!

Hotel Hobbies: My pleasure. I really enjoyed writing about the new album! Before we head in that direction, could you talk a little about what first drew you to keyboards and synths. Where did your early influences come from?

Uri Dijk: Cool! I've always been very creative. I've always felt the need to create from when I was young. I liked making things from wood clay or metal. When I was ten, I wanted to play the piano. But the musical education in Holland at that time was really classical oriented. So first you have to learn music theory and I had to play the recorder. After a year and half, I threw it in the fire and thought I didn’t want anything to do with music again. That was until I was about fourteen. Then it all started for me with Rage Against The Machine. After that, a friend on mine played me Children of Bodom, Dimmu Borgir and In Flames on his headphones and I was like, whoa… what’s this? We were skateboarding on the street and I ran home to my parents to say I was going to play the electric guitar. They said I wouldn’t be because it was way too loud. I told them it had a volume knob but they didn’t like that idea.

Half a year later, it was my birthday. I saved up all the money I got for my birthday and I bought the same synthesizer as the keyboardist from the Children of Bodom. I started playing those songs with my friend and that's kind of how it started out. I never quit. Once I started, I played for four, five or six hours a day for a couple of years. I could read guitar tabs better than I could read musical notes and transpose them to piano. Growing up, my parents only listened to the radio and hardly ever put on an album. I think my mom once listened to Katie Melua or the Beatles, but that was it. They were never like, oh, listen to this. I had to figure it all out on my own and getting suggestions from friends. But being a teenager, listening to metal when you do not know your place in the world or what you want in life feels like a warm blanket of acceptance.

Hotel Hobbies: I know that feeling! Textures has been known for the intricate layers of their music. How do you see your role in creating that sound.

Uri Dijk: Textures was a whole new world! I had learned to write my music through Guitar Pro with guitar, bass, keys and drums. So the only thing that I used were the instruments that were there. The bands I listened to were not that layered; they were focused on playing live. When I joined Textures, I saw how they thought about arrangements and production and I got more and more into that. I started listening to electronic music a lot and also classical minimal like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. It really opened up my like my third eye for what is possible using arrangement and minimalism, trying to make all the layers create one big wall of sound. It took me quite a few years to really, really get into it. On the new album Genotype, I recorded everything at home so I wasn’t bound to paying a studio hundreds of Euros a day. I could take the time to really figure everything out. So it's been a long process of experiencing many different types of music and really being able to breathe the ‘layeredness,’ which was already there from the albums I didn't play on. I tried to really make it my own, which has been an awesome journey.

Hotel Hobbies: Textures has been away for quite a while. How did you keep your own creative energy alive during that time?

Uri Dijk: Well up until Textures quit for a while, I had only ever played in metal bands and maybe the occasional wedding for a friend or stuff like that. I graduated the Conservatory in 2013 with an electronic metal project called The Ulex. I really wanted to do more with it but I never had the time because we were releasing Phenotype. So when Textures was about to quit, I talked to one of my best friends who's a dubstep and drum and bass producer. He was kind of getting tired of that and I was getting metal fatigue. I wanted to do something else. We started this new project called Elodin and really delved into synthesizers, drum computers, live electronics -  a kind of film scoring / game music type thing. That was an amazing journey. It was the perfect in-between for starting again with Textures. I've learned so much about production and arrangement techniques.

Hotel Hobbies: Genotype is only just over a week away. How does it feel to share new music after such a long time?

Uri Dijk: Super exciting. I'm really proud of what we've managed to create. For me, I was working ten hours a day on this monster. Once you finish it and hand it in the masters, that's when you feel the release, in your body. Then it takes four or five months until the first single drops and then you’re very excited. You read a lot of positive stuff but also some negative critique, which is always part of the road you travel as a musician and artist. You try to let go because you cannot change anything. You try to remember that you're proud of what you did and you made all those choices consciously. I'm really looking forward to the album dropping in its entirety and giving people the chance to see what we tried to do as an album and not just focus on singles. Singles are just a marketing strategy.

Hotel Hobbies: So with Textures coming back after that many years ago, what was it like to step back into the band again? What was the chemistry like?

Uri Dijk: It didn’t take time to reconnect personally. It was like old friends. We have been friends for twenty years or more. We've seen each other in the meanwhile, not as much, but at least once or twice a year, we got together. Then you’re in the same room again and it is natural. Rehearsing old songs for playing gigs only took two or three rehearsals and the all the muscle memory came back. For this album, we chose to have a dedicated writing team, which was Stef, Bart and me because we figured it'd be the most efficient way. We looked at our schedules and said we could all dedicate one day a week to come together and maybe another day a week to write like at home. It was a good business plan and an efficient way of doing things. Having been away for so long and also doing many different projects you kind of have like this feeling of replenished creativity. We just had two or three talks like, hey, what should we do? What should our inspirations be? Where do we want to go? From there, it was super easy to just go at it. We all had a similar mindset of the flow we wanted to have for the album.

Hotel Hobbies: You wrote some the music from scratch. What was it like to have that blank sheet again?

Uri Dijk: We tried to get back to the old ideas we had for Genotype but it felt so forced. We all had so many ideas so we chose one to start on together. It was freeing that we were not obligated to work on something specific other than the inspiration that is right there at that moment. There are a few bits from back then. We did actually use some of the old stuff. The ending part of Measuring The Heavens is actually similar to the riff of Oceans Collide from Phenotype. The vocals at the beginning of Walls of the Soul are actually from the original Genotype demos.

Hotel Hobbies: The album opens with Void, a wondrously cinematic instrumental. Was the opening track always going to be an instrumental?

Uri Dijk: Yes, we had this idea to make this synth-based landscape that could also be used as a live. I bought a lot of Red Bull and a few beers and I started at 8 o’clock one evening and 12 o’clock the next afternoon I had it done! It was a one session, all-nighter and it was there. We tried to mould it into a song afterwards but it was already what it was supposed to be. We added some guitars and atmosphere and we thought if we were going to use it as a live intro, why not use it at the start of the album. Its an epic opening.

We tried to mould it into a song afterwards but it was actually already like, it was already what it was supposed to be. So we just added some guitars and some extra atmosphere. And we figured, well, we're using this as a live intro and, you know, why not just use it as the intro? Because it felt a bit weird to put an instrumental somewhere in the middle, even though we've done that before. But it was epic, you know, opening.

Hotel Hobbies: The first song to contain singing is At The Edge of Winter with guest vocals from Charlotte Wessels. How did that collaboration come about?

Uri Dijk: That was also really quite natural. We had the idea of having some collaborations but we thought we had more time. Then the label said, well. You can take all the time you want as long as you finish it by this date (laughing). So some of the songs we wanted to have guest vocals on weren’t finished enough to send around. But At The Edge of Winter was one of the first songs we finished. We know Charlotte; she's our colleague here in the Netherlands. She's our peer as far as age and there aren't that many metal bands that are really making a name for themselves. So, it's quite easy to reach out. We sent her a demo of the almost finished track and within two weeks, we got a demo back and we changed only one or two tiny things and that's what's on the album. So it was super cool. She's super professional.

Hotel Hobbies: A track such as Measuring The Heaven is more varied. How do you approach writing a track that is so ambitious in lots of different musical areas?

Uri Dijk: I agree! I think the Measuring the Heavens is one of the most classic Textures tracks on the album. It all revolved around one rhythm that's on there. Stef just said, can we just have some random numbers, write them down and let's see how that works? We played to those numbers and it sounded interesting. We were creating a whole landscape based on that one anchor. Then, we pulled away from it more and more until you reach some sort of climax. So it was seeing how many ideas you can get from one tiny seed.

Hotel Hobbies: It changes, but at the moment my favourite track is Nautical Dusk. Can you talk about that one?

Uri Dijk: On that one; I took the vocal line and made an answer to it. It was like a question, answer situation. The song has such a long build-up. In your review, you really caught what the song is about. It is about a journey, both nautical and personal. It really takes time to grow. Coming from a classic rock approach, we have an epic solo at the end, making it the climax of the song.

Hotel Hobbies: The last track, Walls of the Soul, feels like there is a bit of everything that has come before. Everything that makes Textures, Textures combining the past and what you are trying to do now.

Uri Dijk: Yes it does. It is interesting because that's also one of the songs that we finished in the studio. The vocals on there are actually from the original Genotype demos. You have these old ideas and new ideas and you try to make them work. Sometimes that makes writing a song a lot more difficult but in a way, it makes the songwriting more eclectic. I think that's also what you hear. You hear a lot of different elements. I was sitting with Bart here next to me in the studio and playing the piano thinking maybe we could do some epic chords. He started playing a melody on guitar thinking maybe we can turn into a sort of choir. That song really came to life in the studio. Like I said, this eclectic approach is also a really big part of Texture's style. It’s really cool that you picked up on that.

Hotel Hobbies: Lyrically, the album tells different stories about humanity. From your point of view and the instrumentation, do you feel that the keyboard has its own storytelling role?

Uri Dijk: Yeah, definitely. I am very much inspired by film music, film scoring, game music and electronic music, where sound effects are chosen for specific emotion. I've worked on that for a long time. So much so that I can safely say that my mind wanders there way before I think about it. I hear parts of music, I'm like, I don't have synaesthesia but you could say my mind kind of tells me, this needs a pad, this needs this specific sound. I just go with it and half the time; it is what it is. Sometimes I struggle but I go with what I am inspired by. One of the benefits of the way we wrote the songs, really chord based, is it gives so much space to fill. I've done some work on commercials and stuff where you get thirty seconds to sketch an entire story. It has really taught me a lot about interpreting what you hear or converting a story into music.

Hotel Hobbies: Having worked so hard on the new album, are there particular moments or songs you're particularly proud of on the new album? Or is just the whole thing of coming back and making such a good album?

Uri Dijk: I am really proud of the whole thing but I am so proud of Void because of how well it turned out in one night of writing. Two of my favourites are Measuring the Heavens and A Seat for the Like-Minded. I really like how they turned out, you know. I spent about a day per song just doing sound effects and sound design. I think there are so many gems throughout the whole album. I think its great that we set out on this path and managed to do it. A super scary thing to do but once you're in it, you get so insecure. You have to push through and you get deadlines. I think this is the same for every musician but it's so cool to dive in and a year and a half later, you come out like all raggedy, sweaty and broken, but you managed to accomplish something. That's a great feeling.

Hotel Hobbies: You have the tour with Jinjer coming up. You must be looking forward to that?

Uri Dijk: Yeah, very much. I mean, it's bittersweet. It's an amazing opportunity. It's something you dream of. Every musician that picks up an instrument dreams of something like this. But we're also a company. We're six or, with our crew, eight people with social lives and work. The money that goes into a tour like this is tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of Euros. It’s a huge investment, which you hope you get back. You have to leave everything behind socially too. You have to make sure you leave everything behind in a way that you can come back to something. Then, you're going to play songs that you never played live before for bigger audiences than you've ever played before. All those things make you really anxious as a person. The key is preparing, asking for help at the right time from the right person and working as a team. I know that once we've done the first show and the first week, we'll be like an oiled machine again, like we've always been in the past. Then all the anxiety washes away and you’re there in the moment. So yeah, I am really looking forward to it.

Hotel Hobbies: So with a new album to promote, how do you go about balancing a set list that shows an album that you're proud of with songs from your past?

Uri Dijk: A lot of discussion (laughing)! It is super difficult. We are the opening act so it’s a short setlist! That doesn’t go together with being a prog band with long songs and having a discography of six albums. At The Edge of Winter is almost seven minutes and if you play a forty minute set, its difficult. I tried to ask ChatGPT what our set list should be. That didn't help at all but I thought it was funny. We have difficult choices to make because we have quite a few singles that need to be on there from previous albums. Songs like Reaching Home, Awake, New Horizons and Timeless.

We also want to promote the album accordingly. So we're going to play two or three new ones every night. Our solution to this really difficult problem is to rotate the set every couple of days. That also means we will be ready when we do a few headline shows, which we have scheduled. I cannot tell you about them yet, other than that we're going to do them. It is difficult to try to cater to everybody's feelings but I think now we approach it like doing the greatest hits, with a few new things and one or two obscure songs every night.

Hotel Hobbies: Is there a track from Genotype that you are particularly looking forward to playing?

Uri Dijk: We've played Measuring the Heavens twice now in India and also Closer to the Unknown. I think they're fun tracks but I'm really looking forward to playing A Seat For The Like-Minded because it's so compact and rhythmically, it is so challenging.

Hotel Hobbies: You mentioned preparation. From your point of view, there’s a lot of technical preparation?

Uri Dijk: I use my MacBook on stage with a program called MainStage, which is like a blank synthesizer where you can load in all kinds of different instances from different companies. I had a pretty cool setup for all the old songs but for the new songs, I went so all out during the recordings that I need a setup as big for just four or five new songs as I did for all the previous songs that we're playing live. I had to do some creative programming. The main synth sound on At The Edge of Winter is so layered; I tried to recreate it but I couldn’t. So I took the original sample, chopped it up and sampled it to the keyboard directly. I also do all the programming for the backing tracks. Luckily, I got all the mixed stems back from Forester Savelle, which is really nice.

Hotel Hobbies: Just to look back again for a moment over your time in Textures, what is the most valuable lesson you've learned as a musician?

Uri Dijk: Wow! That's a very existential question but I think I know the answer. Listen to what the song needs rather than listening to what your ego needs. Really listen to the song. I could talk for an hour about what that means for me. It's so important.

Hotel Hobbies: When fans listen to the new album and have had the whole experience, how do you hope they feel?

Uri Dijk: Definitely to feel something about the lyrics. Phenotype means looking from the inside outward -  like looking at the colour of a bird's feathers or the growth of a specific tree in certain weather conditions. Genotype is looking at the genetic code makeup from an organism and seeing what their background is and what makes them them or what their potential is. Lyrically, these songs are very personal and they're all about introspect and fighting your inner demons. Also, accepting those demons, trying to live with them and making sense of the journeys you have to make in life in order to get where you are. All kinds of like really personal things. I hope that it resonates with people. I hope maybe we can reach at least one soul and make their life one percent better. That would be really cool. Other than that, I hope that people try to understand what we are about as a band. Especially the people that are very critical about the way we've written these songs or the way it sounds, the production or stuff like that . We've always changed with each album. If you listen closely, there's enough relation to the old albums but we've never tried to do one specific thing. We've just tried to make the music we like the most. I hope that concept of this way of making music resonates with people.

Children of Bodom, one of my favourite bands, made consistent albums. They've made the same album over and over and I love them for it but they've had very little musical growth over their career. What we're trying to do is just reinvent ourselves and explore and accept that we are growing as creators, artists and people; I hope our audience has an open mind to this way of making art. If not, that's also perfectly fine. If we will make another album, it will be something new as well. I hope we can take people on our journey.

Hotel Hobbies: I really enjoyed writing about it, so good luck with the album and with the tour. Thank you so much for your time.

Uri Dijk: You're very welcome. I really enjoyed it.