Justin Tuijl – musician & DJ

I used to make music and DJ

Over the years I made 31 albums. Some are still online free to download: Bandcamp.com

There is a Last.fm profile with the Justin Tuijl catalogue listed. I also had some pseudonyms: Bad Mandi, Well Protected Nutter, Magic Tortoise, Polar Bear Express, Disco Valley (artist not label!), Mountain Ghost and Starship Anjuna.

The last album was Dark Vortex (2012) made in my hotel room in Indonesia. I now tinker with Ableton Live and Traktor but haven’t made anything for a long time. When I was young I struggled for years to get a good music setup, or anything at all to make music with. The only point I really started to get an “instrument” was realising my Amiga computer could sequence. Therefore I mostly went down the computer generated direction after that. One of my favourite music softwares was Arturia Storm, it was like an instrument rack on the computer. I made many tracks with it but unfortunately they didn’t develop it for compatibility beyond Windows XP. It became increasingly unstable on newer Windows but I did for a long time keep an old laptop with XP just for Storm.

One of my projects was Starship Anjuna, psytrance, it’s still online though I have lost access to it: Soundcloud also at Bandcamp

I did play a few gigs.

I did DJ all that time too which started with mix tapes and became doing gigs. However, after some bad experiences in Goa in 2012 and some bad gigs in London in 2015/6 I decided to knock live gigs on the head. The highlight of DJing was playing a 7 hour set in 2012 in Anjuna, Goa at the Bamboo Forest “venue”.

So what was a hobby and interest could have become a lot more than that but in the end I decided it was a mugs game, especially after being messed about in Goa and London. While in London I was doing a degree as a mature student and it just wasn’t worth it to have dreadful gigs and try to study at the same time.

A shame as I was getting a few contacts and a few who liked my stuff. The online connections spread out into the real world.