You did the soundtrack for the best Star Wars video game ever: Rogue Squadron. What was that like?

Roughly half of the music was brand new, half of it was classic John Williams compositions. Very challenging, and very scary. I'm such a big fan of John Williams, and of Star Wars. Throughout it all, I kept thinking, "I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!" Ultimately, it turned out pretty nice, I think.

You recently won a Digitakt in a music competition. What do you make of it?

It's a fantastic little machine! As soon as I got it, I went back to the hotel room and made a cool little beat with it. It will be just the right instrument when I need a highly electronic element in a soundtrack.

That said, I'm a composer, not a performer. It's obvious that Digitakt is tailored for performers, triggering things on the fly.

I'm glad it's so small because space and power are at a premium in my very compact mobile studio. I've got solar power, but I need to always keep an eye on my power consumption to run my computers and all my other equipment, even under the Arizona sun.

What's your mobile studio like?

Back in 2004, I went completely virtual. I haven't used any hardware synths or samplers in my music since then. Everything was plugins and VST instruments.

I have my midi keyboard, a powerful laptop, a 4K screen, a couple of IK Multimedia iLoud monitors, an audio interface, a printer and a Mackie 1402 mixer. The really cool thing about my mobile workspace is that I can go anywhere I want. I have several internet hotspot devices here; I have a T-mobile, an AT&T, I get LTE service almost anywhere, and unlimited data.

Looking out today, it's not that sunny even though I'm in the middle of the desert, so I'm running the generator.

If I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon tomorrow, I could!

Many artists did the opposite and made the journey back to hardware during the same period of time!

If I had a big house and a lot of money I would totally do that too, just because it's so cool to touch something tactile and classic. Right now though, with the lifestyle I've chosen, living in a motorhome, which is also my studio, I travel around the US and work with a high power laptop on which I do everything.

Is that a classic breadbox C64 I see there next to you?

Yes, but it is actually gutted! I use a piece of hardware called Keyrah. With that you can plug it into a PC and use it with an emulator. When I dabble in C64 emulation, I can use a real keyboard, which really helps because there are certain things you just don't get on a normal PC keyboard. Even the joystick ports work perfectly.

So I can plug in a Tac-2 joystick and play Giana Sisters? That's so cool!

It’s a nifty little thing!

The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra performed your compositions, including the Great Giana Sisters and Turrican soundtracks, in 2009. Did you see that coming when you composed the Giana Sisters music, way back in 1987?

In no way I could have anticipated that! My grandmother, who tried to teach me classical piano, unfortunately did not get to see that success of mine in her lifetime. She would have been absolutely blown away, I think. It was such an honor.

It actually happened thanks to a fan of mine. He wrote me as a teenager and said he was my biggest fan, and that turned out to be the case. Much later, when he became a producer for orchestral video game music performances, he wanted my music to be part of it.

That Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra performance also featured music by Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy and Xenoblade composer Yoko Shimomura. Did you get to meet her?

I met Yoko Shimomura in Stockholm. She's a very, very nice person. I think our two musical parts of the program really complemented each other, hers being RPG/adventure themed and mine more action-oriented. I really like her work, her Kingdom Hearts score in particular. The game itself really impressed me, and the music was a huge part of that experience.

How did you come up with the Giana Sisters and Turrican music?

Well, the original Giana Sisters game was a clone of Super Mario Brothers, on the C64. It got the company into hot water, Nintendo threatened to sue the company, and it was taken off the market for a few months. The music, however, was not like the Mario games at all.


The boss of Rainbow Arts had the idea to give it a little bit of a reggae vibe to the in-game music, and I tried to do that on a three-voice SID-chip. Not that easy (laughs)! There is a little bit of that in there, some kind of an island feel.

The menu music is what really got people's attention, though. It was a slightly dark electronic theme. At that time, I just did what was true to what I felt inside, and the company was happy with it.

Many of my idols were from the electronic music scene at the time, and for the Turrican soundtrack, for a fast-paced action game like that; I thought synthesizer rock music would be a good fit.

The new Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, on PC and console, had some bits of the original score reworked into it, but there was one cool new thing. Between the two characters, you can switch at any time, and the whole world would morph the graphics. I suggested we do a similar transformation with the music.

I contacted a Swedish chiptune metal band that had done a remix of my Giana Sisters soundtrack in 2001 and asked if they would be interested to collaborate on this project and make two versions of the song. My synthesizer compositions, and their remix with the heavy metal guitars, and then have that in sync fading over with the graphics change when you change characters. It worked! The band is called Machinae Supremacy.

You wrote a sort of tracker progenitor for the c64 in 1986, called SoundMonitor. What was the reason for your design choices?

I wrote my first successful music piece, Shades, which won a contest in a magazine. I programmed that piece entirely in a machine language monitor, a program that lets you see the contents of the computer memory in hexadecimal numbers and edit it. It was a very cryptic way of entering musical notes.

Even though I'm not classically trained, I have enough knowledge from two years of piano lessons. What the notes are called, some harmony knowledge, chords and stuff like that. After my success with Shades, I wanted to make the process of editing music easier.

The first thing I did was to replace the hexadecimal numbers with actual representational note names. I came up with things like a-2 would be an A in the second octave and stuff like that. So, my idea was to make a monitor where you could input the note data in a way that was tailored to sound and music. That’s what became the SoundMonitor.

Do you have any formal music training?

No, but I did have a few years of piano lessons. The rest is self-taught. In my early thirties, I studied some books on orchestration and the instrumental composition of an orchestra.

Usually, when I finish a composition nowadays, I hand it to a professional orchestrator, someone who actually studied the subject at a conservatory, who then orchestrates and arranges it.

How’s your new free-roaming life?

I was stressed out when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I stayed there for almost 19 years, and I was just living there in a big house, working for the mortgage and not really seeing much of the country.

I thought if I could minimize the equipment I use for my work, I could actually go mobile. The initial idea I got for this came from my experience of Burning Man. I went there in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Burning Man was such an amazing experience. 70 000 people, huge Art, DJ’s, performances, even a brass band in the middle of the desert!

I realized I wanted more of this back to basics, back to living, in my everyday life.

I didn't want to wait until I was ready for retirement. Who knows what my health will be like when I'm 70 or 80 years old? I'd probably look back and say "oh I wish I would have done it when I could." I just took it, and ran with it!

Let me just switch the generator off, it's been on long enough. There! We're running on solar now. I've got four 640-watt panels, a big battery bank, and an inverter, all I need to get my 110 volts. I built the whole system myself. If there is no sun I have to run the generator for about three hours a day. It uses gasoline, but not a lot.

Most of the time, at least here in Arizona, the sun is all I need.

Who are your favorite artists?

I'm a big fan of Eighties music, the music from when I grew up. Anything pop or wave from the Eighties, even Italodisco, that kind of stuff. My all-time favorite electronic artists are Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre. I'm also a big fan of newer bands like Hybrid Sound System.

How important is Spotify to you?

Spotify is one of my favorite music consumption tools, and I'm one of the few artists who's not mad at Spotify. I actually love it! I've got all my albums on Spotify, and I'm making more money on Spotify than on Itunes, Amazon and all the others.

It has a lot to do with the fact that I publish my own music, no label in-between taking part of the money. When I hear artists complaining about Spotify, I think it's sometimes because of poor contracts where they get only a tiny fraction of what the record company makes.

Please share a perfect moment you've experienced in your life as a composer!

Hearing my music performed by philharmonic orchestras. Particularly Symphonic Shades from 2008. That was the biggest highlight of my career. I had tears flowing down my cheeks. It was so amazing.

Can you name your three favorite hardware synths?

Definitely the Ensoniq SQ-80, and its predecessor, the ESQ-1. I used to own that. It's the one I used for all the Turrican music. I had the Korg M1, which I'm also quite fond of. Also, although I could not afford that in its hardware form at the time, the PPG Wave 2.3 which I had the pleasure of playing around with in 1981 at a fair. I could only dream of that, until, in 2001, it was released as a virtual synth, and I bought it for something like 150 bucks. I was in heaven!

What VST instruments wouldn't you want to be without?

The Komplete Ultimate Collection by Native Instruments. I upgrade that every year, and there's a lot of good stuff in there. Korg Legacy, they released all their old synths, like the M1, MS-20, MonoPoly and all those instruments as plugins. That's an amazing package, which I still have. There are so many; reFX Nexus is a good one, too. The Arturia recreations of classic synths are worth a mention.

Cubase is your platform of choice?

Yes. I started using Cubase in 1991, on the Atari ST. In the mid-Nineties they ported it over to the PC, so I went there. Then, when the VST revolution came, that really freed things up. It's such an amazing tool.

Which platform did you use right before you switched to Atari ST? Prior to Cubase?

Actually, very early on, even before my C64 music success, I dabbled in MIDI. I helped out at a music dealer in town (Langen, Germany). Then I used a very early Steinberg MIDI sequencer software on the C64 called Pro16. After that I used the built-in MIDI sequencer in the ESQ-1. On the Amiga, I used Music-X. That already had a lot of the workflow that Cubase later had. Those were all cool tools, but most of the music I created between 1986 and 1991 was done with software that I'd created for the C64 and the Amiga, obviously tailored perfectly to my needs.

What can you tell me about the upcoming massive C64 game you are currently working on?

It's a cool project! It's called Unknown Realm, an ambitious RPG for the Commodore 64 and PC that is set to be released next year. They're making a brand new C64 game in the spirit of the old Ultima games.

It's certainly a very interesting, but also challenging project. They want to stay true to the original size and scope of those huge RPG:s, and there’s so little memory for music that I can’t use many of the musical tricks that I developed during the heyday of the C64.

It's very back to basics, making music with what the SID-chip was originally designed for.

Were you familiar with Elektron before you won the Digitakt?

Yeah, I am familiar with your history, particularly the Sidstation. I wanted one of those, but now it's too late, right?

Yeah, the SID chips were all used up.

I heard someone is trying to recreate that chip now, on an FPGA (where you can actually program the structure of the chip, on the chip). Essentially, it becomes an emulation of actual hardware, in the hardware. I hope they make it!

I had a lot of fun MIDI sequencing the Sidstation with the Digitakt. P-locking, especially conditional locks, just make that old instrument really useful again!

The Digitakt is such a deep machine. So many features to discover. I’m very happy that I have the chance to experience it!

Interview by: Daniel Sterner
Photo by: Andreas Wallström