b i o g r a p h y

Torn was founded in 1997 by Stef and Fred, both had a bellyfull of all the hardcore and death-metal bands spawning out more records than was actually humanely possible, every festival they went to was cluttered with hardcore, death and black metal. Having played in death and thrash bands themselves they decided it was not the music they wanted to play anymore.

Frank joined in august '97 after Stef heard him sing a Life of Agony cover with his former band Fairyland of Fools where he actually played the guitar together with Fred. They met up and started writing on some songs.

The search for a drummer and bassist ended later that month when Stijn and Dave joined. As the direction of their music turned to a more symphonic style they decided to take on a keyboard player, Dirk.

Rehearsals started and their style became more defined, leaning towards the more melodic, yet heavy gothic realm of metal, if metal at all... Soon the first gig followed where Torn played among their own songs the Type-O-Negative song "Christian Woman" and thus they were immediately linked to Pete Steele's Gothic exploit.

Eight months later Stijn decided to call it quits because of his ever growing load of schoolwork and the search for a new drummer began. Taking more than a year they finally met up with Danny who had played with Stef before in Meantime, and was looking for a band after being unable to play the drums for a while due to a serious case of whiplash.

Torn kept on playing in this formation for about a year and they've musically progressed from the "Gothic" style to a more alternative not so dark and gloomy kind of "rock or metal" (whatever you like to call it).

After the festival season (Torn played amongst others on the EuroRockFest) they finally got a small deal to record a mini-CD in Stuttgart, Germany. Things turned out very well and the band is certain to return to the same studio to record their full CD later on this year, hopefully again with producer Roman Schönsee.

It wasn't until the beginning of February that the 4 track mini-CD was released, containing 3 new tracks and an original version of the Eurythmics song 'Here comes the rain again'. Reactions to this recording were very positive and contacts were made with several major record labels an concert promoters.

March 22-2001: tragedy struck when drummer Danny suddenly died. After the incident, the band took a break for about a month to look back on what happened but they decided to go on and to get back on track as soon as possible. Again, Torn was obliged to look out for an other drummer. Former drummer Stijn was the first to be contacted, but he still had the same problem: time!

During the Biebob anniversary party, they met up with an old friend: Bart Vernelen. Bart currently plays drums in the metal formation Aggressive Culture, but also wanted to play a different kind of music, more melodic, more groovy. Fortunately he has enough spare time to dedicate himself to play in 2 bands. In May he officially joined the band.

For the moment, Torn is looking for gigs to replace all the cancelled shows during the summer and to get into the right rhythm to record their full-CD.