Dan Johansen
Dan Johansen plays Instrumental, progressive metal with an ancient aura. His music contains various instruments, some ethnic touches, some synth work and a lot of orchestral arrangements.
He composes in a story telling way, he always deeply interpret the meanings of the concept he is working with, whether it is self-written or inspired by old myth. He focuses very hard on being true to the emotions of the project(s) he is working on and he hopes that you can feel that as well when listening to his compositions.
He grew up in Norway, in a family that is pretty musical, his mother has been singing all her life and he has a few uncles that play guitar and drums. So music has been around Dan most of his life. His true interest in music began when he heard the Kiss album Love Gun that Dan bought from a ''used-cd'' shop in the city of Kongsvinger in south-east Norway.
He remembers being pulled against two bands, one being Kiss and the other being Oasis. He loved the song Wonderwall a lot in his early youth. He fell out of this era pretty quickly though after getting more Kiss CD's.
When Dan was about 11-12, he borrowed his uncle's acoustic guitar and took guitar lessons for about 1 month learning only a few basic chords. He then lost interest and fell out of it totally when they moved to the middle of Norway.
His brother, Frank, then introduced him to Metallica and Slayer and he showed me couple of licks from Fade To Black from the Ride the Lightning album of Metallica. Dan practiced for a long time and noticed that he learned it pretty fast and he loved the feelings of playing whole melodic lines. Then he was hooked.
Dan never took lessons again, he learnt reading tabs from Frank then he started learning full tunes... He remembers struggling with Pantera riffs and Slayers speed was too great for him to handle, but he kept on going. After years of covering tunes he started to feel a lack of spirit in playing others' music, Dan then started to compose for fun, nothing serious. It went from simple riffs, to making purely orchestrated tracks, to collaborating with some online guitar giants, to composing in many different styles.
He is a huge fan of music in games, he loves game music, especially RPG music and soundtracks mainly composed in Japan. He also likes movie soundtracks, Alan Silvestri is a big influence, the Highlander soundtrack by Michael Kamen and a great number of Jerry Goldsmith soundtracks are influences as well. All this great music and much more that Dan haven't mentioned have guided him to the point where he mixed the styles of progressive metal, symphonic elements to ethnic elements and a lot more. This mix can be clearly heard in ''The Tablets Of Gilgamesh'' and "Life Systems".
Being a believer in pride and being original, he never tryed to sound like someone else, influences are probably unavoidable to a certain degree, but he does his best to avoid what he has heard before, so hopefully you'll find Dan's music original as it was intended to be.
Aside from this debut solo album, he is also involved in composing for some very promising indie games as well as co-composing the soundtrack for a co-written game project with his brother. Which will hopefully one day be made.
Dan thanks you for reading this. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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