The Connection Machine

The Connection Machine is the multi-talented duo of Natasja Hagemeier and Jeroen Brandjes, who resided in Utrecht in the 90s.

In 1991 they assembled all their ideas and recorded the track 24 Hours with DJ Paradize. Soon after this experience, they started to buy their own gear, all strictly MIDI (which wasn’t too obvious in those days). In their early recording years, they had three producer-names (Syndrome, The Connection Machine and Bitch&Bites), that were all collected under the The Utroid Machine Missions umbrella, which was used for The Dream Tec Album, their debut on U-TRAX.
The duo later became most commonly known as The Connection Machine, a name that is a reference to a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis' (an American inventor) research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. In 1995, they recorded a raw acid 12" for the U-TRAX subabel Phoq U Phonogrammen for which they created the Cray Emoticon moniker, another reference to computer systems.

They went on to create another epic release called The Black Hole EP on U-TRAX, but not after they presented ‘Bitflower’, a true work of art on Planet E from Detroit. Later they released the CD album ‘Painless’ on Down Low Music and in more recent years two 12”-es (shared with The Lost Trax) and an album on Tabernacle Records from the UK.