Joost van den Broek

Joost van den Broek — born in the Netherlands in 1982 — is a keyboard player, producer and recurrent collaborator of Ayreon, as well as musical director of the project's live performances. That last function is the most complex. Ayreon exists primarily as studio work: each record gathers dozens of guest singers from different bands, and was never conceived to be performed live. Turning that into a show — assembling the available singers, adapting arrangements recorded in layers and coordinating a band that must cover orchestral instrumentation — is musical direction before it is performance. As a keyboard player, his contribution lies in the symphonic textures and synthesizer arrangements that hold up the science fiction atmosphere of the records. He comes from After Forever, the Dutch symphonic metal band, and also works as a producer on recordings by other groups of the genre in Europe.