About Me
Quintessence (Guido Maat, AKA Quince, Five, Guidus) was born in Enschede in the east of Holland. At the early age of 2 his parents moved across the country to Uithoorn, a small town close to Amsterdam, where he grew up. His father a musician, his mother a conservatory graduate, music wasn't an awkward thing to pick up. Being only 5 years old Quince was allready tweaking his father's synthesizers, and trying to find his way around a computer. Following music lessons was never one of his favorite things but his mother kept pushing him and he made it trough 8 years of classical piano playing in the local music school. After that, he lost his interest in making music himself, untill his dad brought home a bass guitar.
The big thing looked quite impressive, and so he picked it up and started playing a bit. Hooked quite quick, the day came for visiting the shop and buying his own instrument. After this the dam broke. Soon after, his dad brought home an accoustic guitar, on which Quince started playing as well.
His prime love was still with bass, and he started playing around as kind of a freelance bass player in a couple of local bands, which led to the formation of Zero - G. A Soul/Funk/Jazz band consisting of Quintessence on bass, keyboard player Paul v/d Meer (former co-producer on Skiggy Raps ), drummer Rowan Kempen, and guitarist Ruben Tupamahu. Eventually Zero - G broke up, but Quince and Paul continued a very fruitful duo writing and producing their own material mainly for fun. Paul inspired Quince to pick up keys again into a more jazzy direction, and soon after he started taking lessons again, in a more jazzy type of schooling.
From here on off, things started taking a leap, as Quintessence started studying 'Composition and music Producion' in the 'High school of Arts Utrecht'. In school, he met a couple talented producers/musicians, who soon became close friends. Being a multi-instrumentalist alowed Quince to work with a lot of his classmates, working together on assignments as well as joining hands in personal projects. Amongst them hiphop producer Arts . After a quick afternoon in the studio doing some guitar recordings, Quince's soul background easily merged with Arts' hiphop background. This led to the first official release Quince was featured on: Arts' 'Fragments' EP , released on Unexpected Records .
Also Quince started a collaboration with the boys at Montel Music . Working together intensly on various projects including the GOZS promo, Jalise , and many others.
This is where past meets present. While current projects include Arts' upcoming album, producing housetracks with talented Dutch DJ Fedor Limjoco as well as Escape's Saturday night (Framebusters) resident DJ Raymundo , still working with the guys at MMC , along with numerous smaller projects, including Yanto , and Miss Chianty , Quince decided that he wanted to put some of his own work out, and thus started working on a solo album, probably featuring a lot of the artist that he´s allready worked with, projecting his own image on music upon them.In short, this is not nearly the end, so stay tuned for a lot more to happen.
