I want to make sound effects for biomes. If you're walking along a river you hear the water, then in the forest you hear birds, but as night comes in, it becomes kind of weird, you can walk through a desert, a swamp, and the sounds merge and change with you.
Being the composer of 'Minecraft' is basically like imagining the distance between earth and moon.
With 'Minecraft,' I've started creating serene ambiance music. As the game went on to become famous, people started identifying me as the ambient music person, which I never actually thought I was.
There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.
Production-wise, I've always stuck with Ableton Live and there's really no reason to switch to something else at this point.
This new project, 'Excursions,' has been a trip down my own memory lane before 'Minecraft,' when I aspired to create music I could hear on a commute to dance to.
The first time I saw 'Minecraft,' people wanted to have 8-bit style video game music. But I wanted to go around that and make something organic and partly electronic, partly acoustic, and see if that would be interesting.
I started out being quite an eclectic composer, not quite sure where to fit in. I tried my hand a bit at everything, except perhaps music with lyrics.
I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.
I didn't pretend that I was good at writing music, so I wrote terrible music, intentionally. As time went on, the terrible subsided, and I started getting good.
When dubstep was big, Ubisoft told the composer for 'Far Cry 3' to make dubstep and to me that was really weird.
I think everyone that creates has to cope with the fact that people actually don't give you money because they like you, but because they get something out of it.
I was worried Microsoft would take my music. But ultimately I talked to the lawyers and I still own it.
Mojang doesn't want to just have work relationships, they want social relationships between friends.
Minecraft has a terrible sound engine. Imagine a looping sound file that plays for two seconds and then just starts over.
All the big loud housey songs came from the idea of 'I want to create the same song over and over again.' Except that I've created each one in a different location, or a different mindset.
My music is not worth $2.5bn. And also, I'm not rich.
