This is the musical biography of Roel van Helden. A drummer living in the south of the Netherlands (in a little place called Lottum to be exactly). In his own words:



I was born on September 2nd 1980.



When I was 11 years old my parents bought a drum kit for my brother and I. It started out as a basic setup, but every summer when we had earned us some money with vacation-jobs we would expand our kit with more toms/cymbals, etc. So in a few years we had the biggest kit a young teenager can wish for him/herself. Soon enough I took weekly lessons, although I wasn¡¦t very serious with practicing a lot. But that changed by the time I got my first band together with some friends.



This was somewhere in 1996, it was a punk group called Gramoxone - named after an agricultural toxic

:-). It was pretty much crap, but hey, it was a punk band!!



After a year we changed the line up and the name into DVPLO (after the toys ļ). We made two demo tapes and one self-financed album. The music became a bit more serious and evolved from punk to a kind of melodic death metal/grind/hardcore style. We did about 40 live gigs with Gramoxone/Dvplo. In 2001 we quit Dvplo, and we did an excellent farewell-gig as support for Benediction.



In the summer of 2000, I remember talking to guitarist Coert Bouten (who I knew from an other local band) about starting a new band. We were both into metal like Nevermore and Dream Theater. So we decided to start what would later become (after a dozen line-up changes) Delphian.



Delphian started performing live by the end of 2003. Soon we recorded a demo, which led to more live gigs and a record deal with Finnish label Lion Music. The first result of this deal was the debut album called ¡§Oracle¡¨, released in july 2005.



By that time I had already auditioned and joined Sun Caged as their new drummer. I joined them late 2003, following the depature of previous drummer Dennis Leeflang. Ten live gigs (including one at the Sweden Rock Festival) later the band lost their keyboard player and singer, so we had to find new members. This took us about a year. We¡¦ve been playing live again since mid 2005 and we¡¦ve scheduled studio-recordings (for the next album) in February 2006.



Besides all the metal mentioned above, I¡¦m also familiar with playing some other styles such as jazz, latin and funk. This is mainly because I¡¦ve been studying drums and percussion at the Brabant Conservatory since 2001, and expecting to graduate in June 2006. I study improvised music and took courses to become a certified drum/percussion teacher, which I¡¦m doing now for a (pretty good) job.