Däcker / Synquentium

(c) Photo by Bart Martens.

Dutchman Peter Dekker (1973) remembers to have music in his head constantly since he was a four-years old boy. It takes until his ninth when he comes up with his first compositions. In first instance Peter takes piano lessons and writes piano pieces, and as soon as he obtains his first keyboard on his fifteenth birthday, he starts to make electronic music. Nowadays, Peter owns more than 60 electronic music instruments, with which he composed and recorded an uncountable amount of music.

Peter could be working for days and even weeks on real compositions, but above all he prefers to create music in the most direct and spontaneous way: just sit and play. He tries to reflect his widely oriented musical taste and interests into his compositions, especially those styles you wouldn’t associate with electronica in the first place, like rock, jazz and latin. Main inspirators include Vangelis, Nova / Peru, Jean Michel Jarre, Neuronium, Ed Starink and Jun Fukamachi. With his alter ego Däcker, Peter explores a musical style which also has obvious links with a certain electronic music movement from Germany.

Peter Dekker sees himself as a composer using synthesizers for the creation of his music, rather than a synthesizer composer or musician of electronic music.

Although Peter has been releasing music independently since the early 90s, Däcker’s first official CD album “Pareidolia” was released on Deserted Island Music in 2020. The basis of this album was recorded in 2018 as an improvisation session, and later revised before release by Remy Stroomer.
With this album, Peter wins the first prize in the category ‘Discovery of 2020’ at the German Schallwelle Awards.

Shortly after the album release, Däcker and REMY are on stage at Bas Broekhuis’ BYSS studio for a live stream.
Followed by a solo performance during the second edition of the German Raumzeit Festival Digital (2021).
On May 14, 2022, Peter gives a solo performance during the E-Day Festival, where he performs his music completely live, surrounded by no fewer than 15 synthesizers.
In the same period, Däcker is a few times part of completely improvised performances together with Mäläskä.

Peter’s highly anticipated second album “Anthropomorphic Personification” is about concepts translated into a human(shaped) persona, with human properties. It is a musical leap forward, again filled with analog synthesizer delight and compositions that draw you into the world of Däcker.

Peter’s ambient side-project “Immersion in Total Emptiness”, as his alter-ego Synquentium is going to be premiered at the Brussels Planetarium, at an one-off event alongside album presentations by Rhea (Mark de Wit) and Planet of the Arps (Remy Stroomer) on June 21st, 2025. It is a rather personal piece of ambient music, taking you through time and space, fully improvised using a Roland XP-60 synthesizer only, perfectly fitting the ambience of a planetarium.

Albums

Collaboration