Welcome to the News section! Below is a list of my latest tracks, projects and placements. Here you can see what's going on in my studio: ongoing projects, placements in Film/TV and Video Games, etc.

Hey All!
It's time to summarize the year. 2011 has been a truly great and exciting year at Craze Music. Here's a summary:

• Licensed 110+ tracks for commercial use this year (compared to 40 during 2010).
• 3rd prize winner in the International Songwriting Competition with 15,000+ competing entrants!
• Finalist in Great American Song Contest with Rejoice in Triumph.
• Finalist in UK Songwriting Competition with Adventurous Epic Action Thrill.
• Music placement on MTV to be shown on "MTV at the Movies Awards", aired in 60 countries!
• I've worked and scored the game music for some really talented indie game crews such as Rock Pocket Games, the Abydos Online project and Ironcode Games.
• This year, I also joined some great music agencies with really tough entry requirements.
• And just today, I actually reached 300+ fans at Jango Airplay!
• End consumer music sales has finally started to take off. It's really cool that people enjoy my music for private listening!

So let's hope that 2012 will be as exciting and fun as this year has been! THANK YOU so much, everyone who I've been working with this year and all you fans out there. And of course, I want to thank my wife for supporting me, my son who's giving me all those wonderful smiles every day, and the rest of my family and friends who continue to support my efforts to succeed in this super tough business with so many competing talented composers world wide.

Happy New Year Everyone!
/Christian

The mysterious and cool puzzle and problem solving game Pahelika Revelations was just now released by the hard working guys at IronCode Gaming! The game is a follow-up to the very successful Pahelika Secret Legends. It has been a great pleasure to work with this dedicated team. Writing music in the mystery genre has been really interesting and rewarding. Special thanks to Pallav Nawani - a great working partner that has been very helpful during the development of the soundtrack. I look forward to work with this very professional team again in future titles. The game is available at IronCode, so get busy downloading! :-)

Hola! It's been a busy month, as always. Here's the latest news:

• Signed with a major music agency to pitch my song "Rise of an Empire".
• Licensed Mad Professor for a video game.
• Licensed The Treasures of Ra for a film production company.
• Finished & Uploaded around 20 new tracks to my primary online vendor.
• Finished the complete soundtrack to Pahelika Revelations!
• Sold 3 Epic Cinematic Adventures at Amazon.com.
• Today, I finished a new song that I call Drunken Sailor's Tavern. It will pop up here soon.
• Got some new ordered jobs that I will begin with this weekend.
• Right now, I'm working with some cool sketches that I did a couple of months ago:
  some really fat epic a**-kicking arrangements!

Will post some new song links here soon. Now, back to work! *Cheers* / Christian

The new fresh Elleville Elfrid Game is now released by the incredibly productive guys at Rocket Pocket Games! The game is based on the Elleville Elfrid series shown on Norwegian Television, originally produced by Kool Produktion AS. The target was to give the whole game soundtrack the same feeling as in the original Elleville Elfrid theme, Playful and Happy, and at the same time preserving many of the harmonies from the original theme song.

The game is now available at AppStore, so go check it out! :-)

Hey All! It's been an exiting month, so let me share the recent news at Craze Music:

• This month, actually this week, my songs have been featured on a radio show in the US, the Ask Asti Radio Show.
• During September to October, I licensed 18 songs for commercial use.
• Now reached 200+ fans at the internet radio site Jango Airplay!
• My 25,000 radio play campaign at Grooveshark has just started (and I could actually note some immediate downloads on iTunes after that :-).
• Got the latest CD-Baby sales report containing sales to private consumers through iTunes/Amazon and Spotify - cool! Big thanks to all wonderful fans that downloads/plays my music from these sites, helping me to continue in this super hard business.
• Customized & licensed some of my all-time Epic Top Tracks to the game trailer for Oliver & Spike. Trailer soon to be official.
• Finalizing the game score for mystery/adventure game: Pahelika. Link coming up soon.

"We're always looking for new ways to promote the great talent and music we work with." (October, 2011)

All right, it's really time to bring some news from the Craze Music Studio! Beeing up to full production speed, from late August to late September, I wrote 15 new songs and licensed 41 songs for commercial use. Here comes a summary of finished and ongoing projects:

• Last week, I finalized a project together with the talented Rock Pocket Games studio. As always, it's a pleasure to work with Ivan Moen and these very professional people at Rock Pocket AS. The game is to be associated with the very popular children cartoon Elleville Elfrid at Norwegian Television (NRK).
• Together with the indie game developer Marc Fruchtman, I prepared a couple of my tracks that will be remixed with Marc's fantastic mixing skills. He showed me a sample of what he could do, and together we found a great solution for his project. I am sure the result will be amazing!
• Right now, I'm working with a Mysterious Puzzle Adventure with a great and dedicated team of indie game developers. Their last game Pahelika Secret Legends was a huge success. Now I'm writing the soundtrack for their awaited follow-up, "Pahelika Revelations". This is really inspiring, and I love the way that their lead developer Pallav provides me with detailed and straight-foward feedback. I can tell that this is a group with clear visions which makes this process really interesting and rewarding.
• My collection of fantasy and fairly tale music, "Children and Fairy Tales", was licensed to a very successful game studio, VivaBook. They are working on a new Peter Pan game that will become AMAZING (according the the developer's own words). So of course I will make sure to buy it as soon as it's released! :-)
• My collection of medieval war music, "Epic Medieval War", was licensed by Denis Rule Photography to be used on a DVD photo course! I bet that will be an awesome photo course with all that epic war music. ;-)

Ok, folks, I think that was all for now. Stay tuned with the Craze Music Studio. Things are happening here all the time, so if it's silent for a long while, it's nothing to worry about as it's likely due to the heavy production pace. :-) ... *cheers*/Christian

During the 1st of Sept 2011, it was announced that my song "Adventurous Epic Action Thrill" (Finalist Certificate in PDF) ended up as Finalist in the U.K. Songwriting Contest! For that achievement, I got this nice little certificate. :-) Also, 3 other of my songs made it to the semifinals:

• Dark Tidings (Semifinalist Certificate in PDF)
• Rejoice in Triumph (Semifinalist Certificate in PDF)
• The Raving World Orchestra (Semifinalist Certificate in PDF)

This song was branched from one of my ordered jobs. The customer preferred another branch, but I liked this one, and I didn't want to throw it away, so instead I worked another 20 hours with it to finish it. So here it is: dark, powerful, epic and mighty, in the same style as "Hero of Darkness", "Dark Tidings" and "The War March". Could work well as a main title track to a video game, intro to a documentary about ancient wars or maybe a trailer.

Finally! After completing my last tune, Age of Darkness, meant for this collection of 20 epic music tracks, I released a new album with some of my best songs. All with powerful and dramatic styles, hosting strong themes and majestic moods, ranging from dark and slow to bright and faced paced action.

The album is now available at iTunes, Amazon and many other sites, so go check it out! :-)

The summer of 2011 is coming to an end, but hopefully my productivity is just now coming back to 100% speed! As you may have noticed, I didn't produce a lot of new songs during July. Instead, I have been busy to get my brand new home page with CSS templates up'n'running, and I think the result is pretty cool. Anyway, here's the news:

• I just found out early this morning that I got the fantastic opportunity to sign with a REALLY big player in the music business...
• Here's the MTV ad that will be shown in 60 countries world wide MTV at the Movies!
• On one of my sites, 4 of my songs were selected for use by 2 different Trailer Production companies.
• I recently reached 150+ fans at Jango Airplay!
• New track: Glory to the Brave One
• Almost finished another track with project name "Age of Darkness".

All right! I worked really hard with this one and the 48kHz 24bit version sounds completely awesome!

I got the inspiration from Klaus Badelt's original sound track for Pirates of the Caribbean: "He's a Pirate". To capture that fantastic adventurous mood, I wanted to create a challenging and bouncy rhythm with lots of energy and adventurous feeling. A good friend who is a grand connoisseur of film music got 9/10 on his goosebumps detector on this one... and hey... that must mean something! ;-)

All right, time for some cool news - here goes the summary:

• One of my music agencies in the U.K. landed a TV placement deal on MTV with my song Hero of Darkness!!! A nice cash deal with an immediate sync fee to receive and broadcast royalties to come.
• Released a brand new album, now available on iTunes/Amazon/etc called Children and Fairy Tales!
• I am now in the exclusive Top-50-Composers Hollywood A-List at one of the biggest music licensing sites in the world with 2900+ composers!
• New track in 6 versions: Adventurous Epic Action Thrill
• New track in 7 versions: Playful Stroll

The coming month, I plan to release another album that is almost done: "Epic Cinematic Adventures". Two songs remain to be completed, and then it's ready to go with a big promotion campaign, using the prizes I won at the International Songwriting Competition to get good exposure. So let's see if I can get these last tracks together and get it out this summer!

WHAM-KA-BLAM! Here comes a kick-ass-action-trailer tune! Its driving, energetic and fast beat will make you swallow your popcorns without chewing 'em! 'Cause who's got time to chew in this wild upbeat tune!? A real full sized power trailer. The track exists in 30, 60, 80, and 105 second versions. Then I also made some dedicated stinger versions that I call "TV News Stinger" in 5, 8 and 10 second versions.

Ladies and Gentlemen... *cough* and Dear Children!
May I present to you a brand new release from Craze Music: Children and Fairy Tales!
Available at CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon and other sites.

The songs have a whimsical, adventurous, and charming touch with happy, boncy and jolly themes, telling stories about magical adventures, enchanted valleys, singing bards, dancing princesses and valiant knights! Even stories that begin a bit mellow (Little Village), has a bright and wondrous ending.

Encouraged by sales for the Knight's Tale album, I decided for this release. I got really nice feed-back on these tunes from my No 1 selling music agent, so I hope that these songs will be well received by all music lovers out there. The album also contains one of my most successful tracks, Buccaneer's Song which has been licensed 3 times for commercial use, and it is being used today at 20 TV Channels world wide by a big cable TV network. Check out the album on the Full Size Page Here.

Finally! The last track for my Children and Fairy Tales album! This tune has been on the sketch table for a long while. When I decided to release a Children and Fairy tales album, this tune was a perfect fit as it has a curious and whimsical little melody with some interesting tricks and turns in the harmonies. After working with it for a while, I couldn't decide which version I liked most: the Juympy Flutes or the Joyful Oboe. So why not keep both of them! For this tune, I actually have 7 different versions of various lengths and arrangements. The one presented here is the mixed variant, first with some jumpy flutes, then towards the end a joyful oboe.

The wonderful art is done by Nina Edvinsson for my Children and Fairy Tales album, so I am now using this art as cover art at some of my music agencies. To check out the other track versions and a full size picture of Ninas art, take a peek here.

It's time... for a spine chilling background track, made for Tao Games. With one of my new cool sound libraries, I had just the perfect sounds for a really scary horror game! Luckily for me, I found a very professional game developer, Ben Lehman, who was actually working on a new horror game. So with a couple of feed-back loops, we landed on this 10 minute background track with no real "musical" content, but rather a very mellow atmospheric track with occasional surprising FX to make sure that the player can never relax. So switch out the lights, light some candles and try out one of Bens spooky games. :-)

So what's happening dude? Well... I think it's time to make an announcement:
I became a proud father 1st of June! It's a cute little boy, and his name is Alexander, and I will make a great composer out of him. So if you've been wondering what's going on here, that's where I have directed my attention these last 2 weeks. :-) But of course, there has been other activities as well. Here's a summary:

• Made some harpsichord versions of some tracks to a film contract.
• Submitted a new batch of songs to 4 of my music licensing agencies.
• Started to work on a Horror background track for a new customer.
• Registered and uploaded my complete portfolio to 2 new music agencies.
• Created some additional versions of Busy Winter Noon.

My first in-game song for the huge online project Abydos Online. It's a 5 minutes background track, rich with melody and a really nice theme. The theme was used in one of my other tracks "Blooming Valley", Result by the Great American Song Contest jury, was: Melodic Theme: 8/10, Melodic Structure: 9/10, Melodic Development: 8/10. I decided to develop something around this - "Echanted Forest Walk" was the result. Then I participated in the Alpha Testing of the cool game Abydos Online, so I took a stroll in the local forest, and clearly Enchanted Forest Walk was just the right track for it! :-)

In-Game art from Abydos Online

Here's a new little melodic winter song. I've had it half finished on the hard drive for a while. Suddenly, a film contract popped up where they requested "whimsical" music. So I decided to finish it "really fast"... well... it took me around 3 full working days... While working with this song, I learned some new tricks in the crafting when I tried to finish all those tiny details to get everything perfect in the sound and acoustics. I think the end result is pretty nice, but I'll let you judge for yourselves. Enjoy!

Art by Linda C Wagner

Ohoy Pirates!
Fellows, good fellows, Let's gather around the tables at the Dirty Dog's Tavern. Rumour has it that Captain One-Eye is back in town!
In the gloomy tavern, Dirty Dog, in Shady Harbour Town, a bunch of pirates are celebrating their recent successful treasure hunt! The pirates are dancing on the tables and cheering for gold, beer and good ol' friendship!

Dear Christian,

Congratulations! It is my honor and pleasure to personally inform you that the song "The Raving World Orchestra" has won Third Place in the Instrumental category in the 2010 International Songwriting Competition. With over 15,000 entries from 115 countries, this is a remarkable achievement, and ISC and its judges applaud the skill and dedication to the craft of songwriting that this win has proven.

Time for Nordic Game Conference! Of course, Craze Music was there! I met many professional and interesting contacts there and I look forward to future projects together with some of the very talented people on this conference.

This week, I've had a great talk with Adam Evans at the Film Music Academy. I had the honor of being the first composer in the spotlight at this site. The site is a free community for aspiring film composers and sound designers who desire to break into the industry and are still learning their craft.

This month, I have worked hard with a new epic track. I wanted to do a big score with a strong theme. It took me a while to get it right, but in the end, it was really worth it! The track is for a big fantasy online game under development, and I had the honor of writing the main title track to the game!

Finalist in the Great American Song Contest! Whoaa! Finalist in 2 huge song writing competitions the same year - I almost can't believe it! Here are some words from the Great American Song Contest jury on my songs:

• "You nailed this one and the title couldn't be anymore appropriate. You should pitch your work for film!" (Rejoice in Triumph, finalist)
• "I appreciate your wonderful orchestration & the instrumentation is perfecctly arranged!" (Blooming Valley)
• "This track has tremendous energy and potential and you have a natural ability to create contemporary classical orchestration." (The Great Adventures of Winterfall)
• "There are some wonderful melodic elements throughout this piece and your polished orchestration (as in your other compositions) works very well." (Busy Winter Noon at Frosty Village)
• "You have an impressive talent and produce impressive, flowing and epic orchestration." (Morning at Sunrise)
• "You are obviously a talented musician and you create a consistently dark and dramatic mood, just as your title would suggest." (Tales from the Forgotten Monastery)

Here are the news coming up:

• Sold 10 Epic Compilation CDs to film/TV production companies in the U.K.
• Completed a trailer music track for the Best Nordic Handheld Award-nominated game "The Package".
• Completed a trailer music track "Death Star Empire" for the huge online game for iDevice, "Empire of the Eclipse", coming soon to AppStore (see further down the page).
• I had a meeting with some wonderful people at a music studio in the south of Sweden, and I'm now a partner at their cool site.
• 3 of my songs has been selected for consideration at a professional trailer production company in the U.S.
• I was soooo close to getting a 15.000$ deal for a film contract. My song was selected for final consideration out of 500+ submitted competitors!
• I've been assisting in a project for an interactive iDevice book for children, and I got some great help with the song from a charming 8 year young lady, called Sofia.
• Finished a really good track where I aimed for a perfect production with a high commercial potential. The song immediately become one of the featured tracks at one of the world's largest music licensing sites.
• Work still ongoing with Abydos Online title track. I've had a couple of re-starts, but now I've found a good path together with the developer.

Once again, working with the talented game studio Rocket Pocket Games, I wrote this trailer track for the very cool game The Package, nominated for Best Nordic Handheld Game at Nordic Game Conference! Best of luck with your game at the Conference, guys! I will be there, cheering for this excellent platform game! Check out the full-size Trailer. It's always a pleasure to work with Ivan Moen and the crew at Rock Pocket Games, and I hope to see them soon again in future projects.

In-Game Art from The Package

Working with Rock Pocket Games on an interactive book for children, Wheels on the Bus, I had the privilege to work with the very professional singer Sofia Walther, 8 years old, who performed 9 verses for the Swedish version of Wheels on the Bus. Surely we have just seen the beginning of a very long and successful singing career for young Sofia! In verse 1 above, you can enjoy her voice. And if you fall in love with it (which I find very likely), I am sure you will be able to get the Swedish version of Wheels on the Bus in a near future from Rocket Pocket Games on the AppStore!


The lovely singer Sofia Walther

This month, I've had some great collaboration with the nice guys, Jeff and Lee @ ZarkSoft. I wrote an epic Tron-Daft-Punk-Like track for the game "Empire of the Eclipse". As always, the professional guys at ZarkSoft has been a pleasure to work with, and now I'm really looking forward to see the trailer! As far as I know, this game is the first big sci-fi RTS online game for iDevices, and it has received a lot of attention from Apple. I will be a featured game at AppStore, and I'm really happy to be a part of this. Soon we will get our first iPhone in the Andersson family, and first thing will be to download this cool game!

Art by Lee @ ZarkSoft.

A building, ominous, action packed Trailer tune, going from slow, suspenseful dark threat to fast paced metal! With 24 instrument tracks, this song makes use of the best virtual instruments on the market:

• Sampled heavy metal guitars and drums,
• deep and rumbling sound fx from a virtual instrument collection used in the production of Terminator IV
• edgy electronica with cool arps and sweeping fx!

The track has many 'natural delimiters' for screen changes, great for synchronizing with trailer videos.

It's great to be back in the song writing mood at 100% speed. Here comes the latest news:

• I've just got a great and super cool assignment: The Main Title track for Abydos Online + 1 in-game music track! So right now, I'm working hard to get out that special epic feeling, and hopefully, the result will be one of my strongest tracks so far. I've sent the first preview version to the Boss. Let's see what he says...
• From 900+ submissions from different composers, 4 of my tracks have now been selected for consideration. (Film contracts worth 3500$, only in sync fees... Yay!)
• I got a new very friendly and nice contact that wanted me to add some spice to their sketch of a song to be used in an interactive book for children on the iPhone platform. It was great fun, and we were both happy with the result.
• I completed my first version of "Icy Heights", but there will be a couple of variants on it.
• I have started with a new charming song called "Winterday" with some cute Disney Drama feel. Might be the wrong season for it, but what the heck... I've gotta listen to the inner voice when the inspiration is there! :-)
• I am also working on a happy little piece with the working name "Another Sunny Day", although at low prio at the moment.

Cold and chilling winds rushed over the snowy mountain, and the snow danced and whirled over the hard and icy plains. The sun was glimmering in the crystal formations on places where icy and pointy rocks stood up from the ground, and even though it was cold, it was a beautiful day....

Here comes the latest news:

• I have been working hard to evolve "Small Village" in more versions (~10), thereby increasing the potential for licensing opportunities.
• I recieved some great feedback from a broadcast show in London, Earls Court, and my new Epic Songs Collection got some great feed-back from the visiting broadcast companies!8 CDs were sold, giving me some nice royalty payment on those sales.
• On the TODO list is: continue with one big epic arrangement + finish a little winter-style tune "Icy Heights"+ upload new songs to licensing sites.

Wow! - Finalist in the International Songwriting Competition with more than 15.000 entrants this year! My song "The Raving World Orchestra" is one of the 15 finalists in the Instrumental Genre - incredible! Below is a quote from the email I received:

Dear Christian,
Congratulations, the song "The Raving World Orchestra" in the Instrumental category has been selected as a finalist by the ISC listening committee. Finalists were chosen from over 15,000 entrants, making this an extraordinary achievement. In fact, this was the most competitive year to date, so you should be very proud of this accomplishment. Each year the entries have gotten better and better, but this year was unabashedly the best in terms of quality of songwriting. As a result, it was more difficult than ever to select the finalists and semi-finalists. It was a daunting challenge.

It was an early morning that Knight Roland entered the small town. The morning mist floated out from the forest edges and rolled silently over the green meadows that surrounded the little village.

It was a peaceful autumn morning and a few people could now be seen on the streets as people started to bring out their goods to the village market square. It had been a long night in the dark northern forests for Roland, and he now looked forward to get some sleep in a local tavern...

Back to writing mood - yeah! So what's happening?

• I have just completed a new song called Small Village (should pop up on this page pretty soon). Still some work to do with "Small Village" as I plan to spawn at least one alt version from it with a romantic touch.
• I am working on another song called "Icy Heights".
• My song The War March was licensed as main title song(!) for the brand new product Quaver's Marvelous World of Music.
• I licensed Victory and Peace for the second time this year!
• I was selected as "artist in the spotlight" on the LisnMusic blog. Check it out!

Ok! Time to get back into Cubase - I've got lots of work to do! :-)

Finally, I decided to postpone the ongoing music compositions to 1st of February. January has been a month of artist promotion and establishment of new partnerships and business relations in the industry. This has already started to pay off as the monthly sales have increased by 50% compared to previous year. One of my songs was picked up by a major cable network to be used on 20 TV channels world wide(!), granting some great opportunties for royalty payments. The last days I managed to achieve an important strategic goal that will increase the sales potential dramatically compared to previous year. But in a week or so, new music will start to pop up here again, as usual! Thanks a lot for your patience! :-)

WHAT?? No new music yet? Have I become lazy? Not at all. I am actually dealing with some very necessary but very boring work. Right now, I have around 70 tracks of commercial quality, so it has now become of utmost importance to keep everything in a good order. I have now chosen to invest a couple of weeks to clean up and arrange all the pieces and to promote the music at various sites. So the first 2 weeks of the new year, I have been busy with a number of administrative "tasks", such as:

• protected my content by "watermarking" the songs on my home page (fear not, dear customers & friends: just send a mail, and I can give you non-marked files for evaluation)
• tagged up all my songs with meta data, keywords and selling descriptions
• checked out and read about new sites
• got some new interesting very nice and very competent contacts within the industry

.. and all this has taken quite some time. I still have 1 week left of the boring admin work, and then I'll be back to the fun stuff: to write some new cool music!

Happy New Year everyone! Time to start the new year in the same style as 2010 - full speed and high productivity!

• Finished off the dark epic arrangement Hero of Darkness. It was a lot of work (~40 hours) and I'm not sure it was worth it. We'll see about that... (Update: 2011-07-15, it was worth it! Placed on MTV through one of my agencies in the U.K., 560$ sync fee + royalties! :-)
• Tried the site uplaya.com where I submitted 2 songs to check my hit potential. One of them was Blooming Valley - Mighty Flute Ending which scored 8.0 and won the Platinum Auddy Award. Nice! :-)
• Practiced some sound-mastering technniques and discussed strategies at various forums, aiming to improve my overall production sound quality.