B I O G R A P H Y

T H E   F U L L   B I O G R A P H Y

Jeroen van der Wiel (1970 December 6th), artist name ´NiMO´, was born in Amersfoort-The Netherlands. The artist name NiMO is taken from the name Geronimo, Jeroen is the ´Geron´ from Geronimo and ´Nimo´ being the leftover.

At the young age of six Jeroen started to experiment on his father’s acoustic guitar and on the family Hammond organ. Through the record collection of his brother, he discovered the space music by Jean-Michel Jarre in 1978 and many of Jarre´s songs were covered on the family organ. With the financially help from his father, Jeroen buys his first synthesizer, the Keytek CTS-2000. Followed two years later with the Roland D-5 and D-10.

“Back in 1978, when I was about 7 years old, my 6 years older brother had bought the single of Equinoxe 5. This was my first encounter with French synthesizer pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. I was immediately intrigued with these new spacy sounds. His melodies were simple but the whole atmosphere of the work was, me to, something totally new, something I´d never heard before. I remember staring at this strange character on the sleeve staring back at me through his binoculars, while the single was playing on my record-player, over and over, back-to-back. I started to listen to other tracks and soon I started covering some of his tracks on our family Hammon-organ.”

“Around 1985 I started to develope an interest in this new kind of NASA space rocket that was able to go up in space and return back to earth, landing like a regular aeroplane; The Space Shuttle. And since the first launch I started to collect newspaper articles and pasted them in a scrapbook. Early 1986 I witnessed the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger on TV and was, obvious, in shock. Shortly after I heard about the Jean-Michel Jarre concert in Houston, Texas and I was surprised to see two of my interests getting combined, how cool! Of course I had to buy Jarre´s new work, first the maxi-single of ‘Fourth Rendez-Vous’ and not much later the whole album. From that moment I was a truly Jarre-fan and I started to follow his career until the present day.
Due to my age and not having the right people around me, sharing the same interest in Jarre as I did, I was unable to see Jarre live until 1993. In 1990 I was thinking about going to the ´La Defense´ concert in Paris in July 14^th, but at the last minute I decided not to go. I still regret that decision…”

In the period 1990-1995 he is discovering his musical identity by writing his own music and creating experimental demoes, resulting in joining the Dutch neo prog band Odyssice in 1995. With Odyssice he records his first album in a real studio ever.

“Thanks to the influence of Jarre and other bands, such as Queen, Marillion, Yes, Pink Floyd, I started to develop myself as a keyboard-player and my style of playing became influenced mainly by Rick Wakeman and Mark Kelly, and my composing style was hugely influenced by their band´s music (Yes and Marillion) and of course Jean-Michel Jarre. I first started behind the already earlier mentioned family Hammond-organ, complete with rhythm box and automatic arpeggiator chords. In 1989 I bought, with the financial help of my dad, my first synthesizer. By 1992 I had 3 synthesizers, two of them PCM sounds based, and I had the Tascam Porta 05, a 4-track recorder using the A and B-side stereo tracks of a cassette simultaneously to create the 4 recording tracks. I started experimenting with the machine by making demo´s, recording them, doing overdubs and stuff. Not much later I bought 2 Sony MiniDisc recorders so I could ping-pong, playback my previous recording on one MiniDisc player, play along and record it with the second MiniDisc recorder. Those demo´s resulted in me joining the Dutch progband Odyssice in 1995 as their new keyboard-player.”

Between 1996 and 1998 Jeroen performs his first concerts during Odyssice´s ´Moondrive´ shows, in venue´s such as De Boerderij Zoetermeer, Tivoli Utrecht and Hedon Zwolle, playing amongst artists, such as Mostly Autumn, John Wetton, Pallas and Clepsydra.

“Odyssice already had some history, the band was formed in 1982 by Bastian Peeters and in 1986 they had some success when Dutch Radio Veronica DJ Kees Baars selected them as new band of the week and broadcasted a few tracks from the home-made demo cassette `Track One´ on the national radio in the radio show ´Countdown Café`. The responses from the listeners were amazing, the radio station could not handle the number of telephone calls they received that evening and in the days after, everybody wanted to know who this band was and where they could buy their music. But the band didn´t take advantage of this success and disappeared again in oblivion.”

In 1997 Jeroen met the American guitarist John Hayes, known as the guitarist of Mother´s Finest. First only for designing the album sleeves for John´s solo project and later joining the project as keyboard player.

“In the meantime I was still with Odyssice, but the process of creating new music was slow, and I started to get in contact with other musicians. I already was playing with John Hayes, Mother´s Finest´s gitarist, for a short while I was part of his side-project called ´The John Hayes Project´. One of the highlights of that period was opening for Kiss back in 1999 during their show at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund-Germany, as part of their Psycho Circus Tour, in front of 14.000 KISS fans.”

In 1999 Jeroen records the second Odyssice album ´Impressions´ in the famous Spitsbergen Studios (a.o. Focus, Herman Brood, Solution & Ten Sharp), followed in 2000 by a couple of concerts, such as opening for The Flowers Kings at De Boerderij in Zoetermeer.

“After I joined them in 1995, Odyssice finally came to record in a real studio and produced their first album ever. The EP ´Moondrive` was released in 1996 as a private release. Orders were shipped to countries all over the world and within a few months it was sold out. The EP was followed by the full album ´Impressions´ in 2000, released on the British label Cyclops, who distributed it worldwide and copies were sold in whole Europe, North & South America, Indonesia, Australia and Japan. We did some live shows in Holland, we were offered to play in The UK but the travelling expenses couldn´t be covered. Not much later we were actually offered to do shows in Japan, all expenses covered, but some of the other band member’s weren´t ready for this big next step into ´stardom´.”

In 2006 Odyssice records their first TV live performance at RTV Noord-Holland in front of a small group of family and invitee´s, which was released in 2013 as live CD/DVD.

Odyssice records their third studio album in 2009/2010. The album ´Silence´ was released in 2010 and only one show was performed as opener for the Australian ´Unitopia´. The whole performance was professionally recorded on digital video but was never released.

In that same period Jeroen moved to the very south of The Netherlands, the center area of the province Limburg and ever since lives in the ´smallest piece of The Netherlands´.

In 2013 Odyssice did another small tour in The Netherlands to promote the release of the CD/DVD ´Secret Showcase; Live in Amsterdam´ and the deluxe re-releases of the first two studio albums.

That same year Jeroen began to work on his first solo project ´Thirteen´, a female fronted progressive rock project. Thirteen´s album ´A Shot In The Dark´ was musically heavier then what Odyssice did and was released in 2014. Jeroen played all instruments (except the electric guitars), recorded, engineered, mixed and produced the entire album.

“Around 2010 I became friends with Ian Parry, known for his work as lead singer of the progressive hardrock band ´Elegy´, through one of my firneds (and one of the guitarists I used for the Thirteen project). First I did some artwork for his ´Consortium 5 Project´ and later I performed, alongside of Barend Courbois, Timo Somers, Ani Lozanova and Gary King, on a couple of tracks for the Ian Parry´s Rock Emporium album.”

After the contributions for Ian Parry’s Rock Emporium ‘Society Of Friends’ (2016) Ian and Jeroen joined forces in 2019. Jeroen wrote 5 tracks for Ian´s next solo album and played keyboards on all 10 tracks of the album, he also provide the artwork. The heavy presents of (pulsing) keyboards by Jeroen is a very clear influence on this album, he painted the instrumental parts with swirling solo´s and paved the supporting backdrops with rich harmonic strings and Hammond organ. The album ´In Flagrante Delicto´ with a rich cast of musicians (such as Stephan Lill, Patrick Rondat, Mario Zapata, Timo Somers, Torsten Reichert, Barend Courbois, Robert Finan, Imre Daun, Andreas Lill and Casey Grillo) was release in 2020, just days before the Corona outbreak.

“A big surprise was that Ian had arranged a certain person to play the guitar-parts on 2 out of my 5 compositions. This person was nonetheless than Jean-Michel Jarre´s live guitarist (1993-2005) Patrick Rondat! I was hugely honoured…”

A small tour through Europe was planned but Covid made sure that, despite being rescheduled three times, this tour never happened. During that same Covid period Jeroen recording on two songs for the second Rock Emporium album entitled ´Brute Force´ (2021), on ´Isolation´ and the Queen cover ´One Vision´ (together with Beth-Ami Heavenstone, Martin Helmantel, Allan Sorensen, Patrick Rondat, Kris Gildenlow, Luca Sellitto, Bob Wijtsma, Sander Zoer, a.o.).

In 2022 Jeroen started working on a complete new musical direction, heavily influenced by the latest work of Jean-Michel Jarre, Alphe6 and Neuland. He started composing and recording experimental EDM and therefore also adopted an artist name. NiMO was born. Three tracks were recorded and two of them, ‘Paris’ and ‘Retrocausility’ were released on the streaming services early 2024.

“In 2019 I saw on YouTube a video of a very interesting adaption of the Oxygene 1-4, which was very inspiring. That video planted the seed in my creative thoughts and the idea of transforming Jarre´s music to piano was born. I started to think in what direction the mood of the music should go, should I stick to the original tempo, how close should I stay to the original melodies, how free should the interpretation be? It took some time but early 2022 the idea finally develop into a concrete concept. I was already an admirer of Claude Debussy´s piano works for years but around this time I also started to listen to the piano music by Dustin O´Halloran and Yann Tierssen and that was exactly the direction I wanted to go to, dreamy with a lot of warm feelings and emotions. Sadly enough electronic music is often called ´cold´ and ´programmed´ and therefore regarded ´emotionless´, maybe even without a ´soul´. So could it be actual possible to accomplish that with the music of Jean-Michel Jarre? Well, I thought it was. And I took on the challenge to proof just that.”

Between summer 2022 and autumn 2023 he worked on the piano album; arranging, playing, recording and mixing. Jean-Michel Jarre gave his personal approval to commercial release these piano versions.

“I felt the album needed something extra that would make this album unique. One morning the idea was there: how cool would it be if Patrick Rondat would play his part on ‘Chronologie 3’! On acoustic guitar! Wow, what a crazy idea, but how cool would that be?! A couple of days later Patrick replied to my message and said he that although he was rather busy, he was intrigued by my request. He loved the piano version and told me that the song has special meaning to him since it was the very first track he and Jarre worked on. But he wasn´t sure if he could come up with a fitting part since my version is slower than the original and he had to play acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar! We agreed that he would simply give it a try and see if the result would work. Two weeks later he wrote me to check the download link my email. He had managed to pull it off! Now I had the finishing touch for the album I was looking for.”

On 24 August 2024, Jarre’s 76^th birthday, the piano album ´Jarre Acoustique´ was finally released, containg 11 piano tracks including the participation of Jarre´s 1993-2005 live guitarist Patrick Rondat on ´Chronologie 3´ playing acoustic guitar.
 
“Looking (and listening) back at the piano album I feel tremendously proud when I hear and feel the warmth and emotions in Jarre’s melodies. And I can only hope that the listener will feel the same, cause in the end it´s for the listeners, the musicians create their music, to give you the emotion, the memories and the joy of experiencing music, with the hope it will touch your soul.”