Pirate Creates Music: Razor1911’s “dubmood” Kickin’ It Chipstyle

January 31, 2009 by sharky

Fellow Gamers, unless you were raised by wolves and live in a cave, you probably know about Razor1911: the never-say-die oldschool release group with roots all the way back to 1985. Convalesced and still going strong, likely you’ve seen some of RZR’s recent exclusive PC releases: "Grand Theft Auto IV", "The Lord Of The Rings Conquest" and "Far Cry 2" - to name a few. One Razor1911 member "dubmood" who’s been an orchestrator of many cracktros in RZR’s demodivision since 1999 - has also been busy in the real-world music scene. If you haven’t heard dubmood’s stuff then you’re in for quite the listen, including "The Mighty Pirate Sessions Volume 1".

Dubmood is a crossgenre Swedish chipmusician who started creating his chiptunes on modarchive back in 1996 and "The (Mighty) Pirate Sessions Volume 1" [mininova link] is his first MP3 release he created entirely on an Atari. He is still active with Razor 1911, although their demodivision (much like many other groups) is slightly less active now (at least with cracktros for warez releases) than before. As his MySpace bio quotes "he has been composing chipmusic for various crackgroups but now residing with the infamous Razor 1911, by FBI described as the oldest software piracy ring on the Internet. Since 2004 he has been performing live, both as a Electro-DJ and Chipmusic livesets, alone and in different coalitions. Being an oldie and a style-originator in today’s chipmusic-community, dubmood earns not only the respect for being mentioned a vital sources of inspiration and the reason for discovering chipmusic by today’s new chipmusic-artists, but also he has also been recognized by bigger mainstream acts as a popular producer and remixer".

Dubmood has performed over 100 times in 7 different countries in front of audiences as large as 2,000 people. He says that "as long as the people you play with have the same ideas and want the same things it’s great fun". Even though he writes all of his music, he has no formal musical background. "I guess that started when I was a kid and I had just learned to read", he reveals. "My dad came home with an Atari1040ST one day and it just continued from then on. I guess I was six year old back then."

Since chipmusic is not a widely popular, or an even ‘known’ genre, Dubmood provided us with this definition:

Chipmusic as the correct definition is music made on computers equipped with old digital soundchips which can only produce beeps and noise and that wasn’t made to replay recorded samples. For example the SIDchip in the Commodore64, the YM2149 chip in the AtariST/Spectrum and the sounds of Nintendo 8bit consoles and Gameboys. But a wider definition of the term chipmusic is to make music using small loopable samples (like a few bytes) coming from those machines but on a more modern setup in a certain sequencer called tracker like Fasttracker, Protracker, Skaletracker or later Renoise. This is done for two reasons, to maintain the cool bleepy sound and to keep the size of the music files down to a matter of 10 kilobytes to be used in small computer applications more or less related to the computer piracy scene.

More of dubmood’s work can be found at mininova:

— http://www.mininova.org/user/Dubmood

Other dubmood Links:

Dubmood has been featured in at least a dozen key generators and a bunch of cracktro’s for mainly Razor1911, but for a few other groups as well. Here’s some of his Razor1911 releases:

Touring Info

Presently on tour in Marseille, France with Facteur. We asked the Swedish-born dubmood if it’s been much of an adjustment to jump into the French language. Dubmood coolly replied, "After three years in France, I am more or less fluent in marseillais-french. But since I’ve lived in Marseille which, even though it is in France, shouldn’t be confused with France. It’s obligatory with triple airbags to avoid cultural shocks. Marseille is 2000 years older than France and contains only 10% French…"

Additional info can be found on dubmood’s MySpace music page, as well as on Razor1911’s website:

— http://www.myspace.com/dubmoodst

— http://www.razor1911.com/dubmood



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