Growing up in the slums of Schiedam, Tomek van Leeuwen (1995) didn’t have an easy youth. Working daily in the local mineshafts from dawn till dusk left its traces in his playing, as you can clearly hear in his deeply rooted warm round tone. After years of child-labour, and selling one of his kidneys, he could finally afford his first instrument: a panflute made of a PVC tube, held together by shoelaces that he and his friends found on the traintracks while scavenging for used cigarettes. On this instrument he took his first musical lessons with the local butcher, who happened to be in fact a classsical harpist in his spare time. Initially, his progress was pretty slow, and nobody would have expected him to turn out into the alright bassist the he is today, but after hearing a rendition of “Happy Birthday” on the radio late at night whilst his parents were fighting in the kitchen, he caught the spark. His mother, noticing the little boys’ eagerness to learn, decided that it was time to send him away to a boardingschool in Dresden to learn counterpoint with the great composer and professor in counterpoint herr dr. Olaf. P. Doppelzimmer. But in Dresden his development came to an abrupt halt, as he was spending al his tuition and parents’ money to get hammered in the famous Dresden nightlife. And after finishing 7th rank and lower in several music competitions, his self-assurence got heavily battered which lead him to a cynical and nihilistic world-view. These “Autumn Years” (as later his biographer Nepomuk Grande would go on to call them) spanned over a period of about 4 years (2013 - 2017) in which he was relatively musically inactive, and took up interest in other aspects of life. Switching between jobs consecutively as a high-way toll keeper, night-guard at a mid-sea drill platform and cleaner at a paintball centre, he spent his free time delving into his other hobbies, such as ice sculpting and photographing incoming planes at the local airport.