Bryn Schurman: Hi, this is Bryn Schurman on Sun 103.1’s Eleventh Hour. I’m here with Pieter from the band Knight Area. Good to have you here.

Pieter van Hoorn: Oh, thanks. It’s nice to be on your show.

BS: Thanks. So, who are your drum heroes?

PVH: My drum heroes? Well, of course, there are some very technical guys like Mike Portnoy and Simon Phillips, and there are some guys that are great drummers because of their energy and their service to the band, without being very technical. You can imagine, those are the drummers in the more symphonic bands like Marillion or Pink Floyd or those kind of bands.

BS: With a seven person band, is there room for everyone’s egos?

PVH: Well, I think there is. If you are a good band, you are able to make a product which is very good without seven egos, but trying to make one sound. I think in our band, we can do that, we can make one sound and-the total is good without being all seven egos who are playing their music separately. We all can have our solos and our fills and our highlights in the music, that’s no problem.

BS: Has the computer-based home studio affected the way you guys record or write your songs?

PVH: Writing the songs? No, I don’t think so. Recording? Yes, of course. Maybe the computer era has changed the way we’re writing, because Gerben, our main composer, he writes the songs on his computer and a program called Cubase. Then we get a kind of framework of the song. We all get it and we make our own parts of it. We do it at home. I do it in a rehearsal room in my garden on an acoustic kit, so nothing with computers. And then we come together and we’re going to arrange the songs.

So that’s the conventional way to work on the songs. We arrange it together in a rehearsal room and we play it a lot of times. We play it on live gigs, and then after that, if the songs are matured, we record them. The recording, of course, we do it with the aid of computers.

BS: Pro-tools and all that?

PVH: Yeah. Well, everyone plays his part in the conventional way. And after that the editing and et cetera, it’s all computerized.

BS: On the web site, you have some studio diaries on there and you mentioned a song called “Enclosed”. I don’t see that on the album. Did that become a different song?

PVH: No, I think it’s a working title. We didn’t have all the titles we have on the CD, but we did have some working titles to give the songs a name. After a while, they got their final titles

BS: Speaking of titles, the song “Exit L.U.M.C”, is that an acronym for something, or what does that stand for?

PVH: Yes, it is the acronym for a hospital in the Netherlands: Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum. At the hospital and one of our band members, Joop, he had some bad experiences in that hospital together with his wife, and the song is about those experiences. The name of the hospital is in the title.

BS: Any festival appearances or tour plans for the States?

PVH: For the states? No. Of course, we have plans, but no dates or whatever. First, because it’s a little bit difficult to go to the states. We played on the Nearfest. It was a real good, nice gig for us. It was a highlight in our career, I would say. But because we are from the Netherlands, we are from Europe, and we have our management here in the Netherlands. We don’t have anyone in the States to arrange those gigs for us, so it’s very hard. I think if we want to play in the United States there must be a kind of a request or something like that

BS: I imagine getting all the visas and everything in order has got to be a big pain.

PVH: Yeah, and also financially. We have a lot of people, we have seven band members, a light and a sound engineer

BS: And I imagine you want your keyboards and gear to travel with.

PVH: No, I don’t think that’s the biggest problem, because like Nearfest they arranged everything for us. It was very, very well-organized. We sent them e-mails with what we needed and everything was there. It was very good.

BS: I might be going on a limb, but has Arjen Lucassen contacted any of the Knights for a new Ayreon project?

PVH: (laughs) No, not that I know. Not yet.

BS: Any parting words for our listeners

PVH: We really appreciate that a lot of people in United States like our music, listen to our music, and support us. So a very warm thanks from Knight Area to all the people that are supporting us. Thank you.