Profile Feature: Dubmood
“He has decided to show the world what a few Atari STs and Game Boys from the mid 80s are capable of doing to one’s mind, body & soul…” Does it tickle your interest? Read on!
Kalle Jonnson aka Dubmood is a chiptune artist from Gothenburg, Sweden. Instead of rewording his bio and activities here, I asked Kalle a few questions to get to know the man behind those bits. Things I was interested in are…
…The moment when an 11 year old guy stops playing with his consoles/computers and start to create music with them
I’d say it is a combination of a little boy wanting to be a rock-star and the revelation that many young men (and a few women) had in front of their computers in the early 90s when they encountered the phenomena known as The Demo scene.
Seeing a demo for the first time back then when demos was still ages ahead of other computer-graphics and at the same time hearing something that sounds like the game-music you were used to but remixed and blended into real not so cheesy music was probably the most important thing that ever happened to me.
…How did he meet/join Razor 1911 (the notorious warez and demo group)
After a few years of hard work trying to imitate my favourite chip music composers and at the same time creating my own “sound” I managed to place some of my tunes in crack intros and keygens by semi-big groups at the time as Divine, Origin and Fantasy.
Both Divine and Fantasy had strong affiliations with Razor 1911 and one day I got contacted by IZM who was the demo-division leader at the time. I had just turned 15.
…If he has a PS3 or Xbox 360 (I don’t dare to mention Wii)
No, the last console I ever bought was a SNES.
…Why did he choose Marseille to live in
I needed new horizons, and wanted to avoid the most common mistake that young Swedes who emigrate do which is ending up in some Swedish colony in Barcelona, New York, Berlin or London. I also wanted to avoid any prejudices that Swedish sloppy tourists might leave on the local population of the place where I settled down, so Marseille which had almost no tourism at the time seemed pretty perfect. There were a few French Razor members here and the place had a pretty dirty reputation. Awesome way to learn French.
My plans were just to stay for a few months but I fell in love with the city.
…The creation and working of Data Airlines (the label founded by Dubmood)
We felt we needed to upgrade the image of chip music and take it back from certain individuals who had degraded it to an internet hype where you spammed pictures of space invaders and Game Boys all around you and made random note up-tempo bit pop so we decided to start a label with a much more serious approach to the chip tune movement with a dance music direction. I wish I had more time to work on the project but recently a few young talents have started to take up interest and the future looks very bright. I’d like to mention some people who deserve credit, Kris our label manager, Erik from Elapse.se who does almost all the artwork, Anaïs who takes care of promotion and Sodamnloud! who was very important in the beginning and pushed me to actually realize the project.
…One thing among his interests unrelated to chip music
Football, geeks like me tend to hate it but I love to be geeky about it, football that is. I am a dictionary on football history and stats and never miss a Marseille home-game if I’m not on tour. And still, we have cancelled/delayed concerts to be able to watch games. Football in my native country has had a lot of bad publicity because of hooliganism over the last 20 years but here in France there is almost nothing of such. It is a beautiful game that should be taken back to the broad masses and not degraded to something associated with machoism, business, violence and alcoholism.
…An unexpected one: What does he think about Flattr
I think Flattr is a great idea and I am very excited about seeing it grow. Currently its userbase seems to be limited only to and for creators of any kind and lacks the “consumer” of such creations. Even though internet and our generation is taking that direction of “circular-entertainment” I’d still like to see the user-base get broader. But think of it, today people have to pay 30 bucks for their internet connection, another 10 for their VPN to avoid the IFPI internet cowboy organisation, another 10 for Soundcloud, Dropbox, etc. Would maybe be a good idea to bundle that Flattr fee into one of those mentioned above. Imagine if you’d have a Flattr option with lets say 5–10 bucks to flattr with included in the internet providers bill each month and you wouldn’t have to think about it, wouldn’t that be great?
…And that what does he reserve for the future
I am working on a trilogy of Dubmood EPs for 2011 and the first is already out, called Badlands. Now my plans are to set it up as a group and actually play stuff 100% live and stop the live-PA thing. That is a pretty big step and I hope I will be able to make it and find the right people with whom to do so. Apart from that our future plans is to step up the game on Data Airlines a bit and put out more top-notch chip music.
I would like to add to his profile, that I got the answers within an hour after I sent my questions. +1
If you want to know even more:
