andreasviklund.com

First of all, music! Only four days after posting a link to the old Leeloo Project music page on the classic free music site Beatmaka.com, the three Leeloo Project remixes are ranked #1, #2 and #3 on the Beatmaka music chart.

While it is not very hard to achieve (Beatmaka appears to be very silent nowadays), it brings back warm memories of the Lagoona era and the way producers tried to outshine eachother with new and fresh songs. There are still some amazing tracks to find on the site, so it is a bit sad to see the low activity.

Second, WordPress themes! Since the opening of the new WordPress theme directory and the release of three of my themes there, I have browsed through lots of great themes. And I've followed the "most popular" list with big interest to learn more about what makes a theme more interesting.

Yesterday I noticed that WP-Andreas01 was one of the featured themes on the frontpage, and that it is currently the most popular theme out of the 145 that have been made available on the theme directory so far. It was a nice surprise that gave an extra boost of inspiration. I know that it will be pushed away from that spot very soon, but I can't help being a bit proud about it. After all, the andreas01 template which the theme design is based on, was the first website template that I ever released. It is just amazing to see that it still finds its way out to new users more than three years after its original release…

No time for celebrations though! Johanna and I are very close to an official launch of our web development company, but we still don't have any own company website online so that is one of the priorities for now. The company is named Ileva after my ILEVA idea, and I am happy to announce that there will finally be official Ileva templates out there. Not as an open source design concept, but with the same idea behind the code. And of course still free. I will write more about it in future posts, for sure.

I have mentioned the Leeloo Project before, and referred to it as my new band. Things are slowly starting to happen, and the official website will be launched soon. I will probably write a lot more about the band and the adventure that it will be (not to forget, the amazing skills of Perzzon, the other half of the duo) but I'll save that for now and just post an interesting link to classic music site Beatmaka.com where you can listen to three full remixes for free:

Listen to The Leeloo Project (click the "play" buttons)

In my slowly ongoing project to organize my old music and sort out the best pieces, time has now come to do something about all the many intros and semi-finished songs that I have made over the years. Out of about 150 unfinished songs and a few released ones, I have gathered 12 tracks in different genres that have one thing in common: They are all suitable as mobile phone ringtones. Short, melodic and instrumental, these old clips (made between 1997 and 2002) are not that good - but if you want a somewhat different and pretty unique MP3 ringtone in your phone then you may want to listen to these songs.

The files are released in the form of an MP3 album which is simply called "Ringtones". Like all of my music, these songs are free to download and free to use. And free to share with your friends if you would want to. All I ask for is that you leave the ID3 tags intact. Here are the direct download links:

Updated: The links have been moved. The ringtones were downloaded in thousands of copies and my server couldn't handle it very well. I did not expect that kind of interest so I'll need to organize it in some other way soon.

An old hero and family member left us today. Molly, the dog my mother (Yvonne) and father (Kjell) got ten years ago when I was still living in my childhood home, had stayed by my fathers side ever since mom passed away year 2000. Molly had a heart of pure gold and will be greatly missed, not only by us humans but also by her friends from Kennel Anthems.

I will keep a candle burning tonight for you, Molly. Thanks for everything!

Click the image above to download "See the light", a short piece of experimental music that I recorded live in my music studio on a sad day back in 2001 using a randomized arpeggiator and two synthesizers (a Roland JP8000 and a Roland XP-30). It is a strange little melody, but the short recording is still very emotional to me…

I have spent a lot of time on sorting my old music collection, trying to decide what to keep online and what to clean away. While the personal value is high for many of the older songs, the songs are honestly not very good. Outdated sound, bad technical quality and noisy samples can be heard in most old tracks, but there are still people out there who like to listen to them so I still want to do something good with them. However, it has been more than ten years since the oldest songs were made, and in some way I feel that I want to focus on the songs that means the most to me (and that sounds OK to others) while letting the less good songs get their final rest. I have done that by taking the songs down from this site and re-organizing them into a smaller collection, split into a set of MP3 albums.

The oldest album, "Dreams" by TSEC (1998, DayDream Records) is already available in MP3 format on this website. The Lagoona songs have been sorted into their former MP3.com albums: "Magic Melodies", "The journey" (both released in 2000) and "Generations" (2002) along with a new album called "MP3 singles" that contain the songs that were not released on any album. The new album will contain a couple of remixes and even a few Lagoona live tracks as an added bonus. And finally, my own songs have been sorted into two albums. The first has been named after my 2001 MP3.com album release, "eXtended Modules collection", and it contains 16 old songs that I made with the legendary music program FastTracker 2 between 1996 and 2003. The second album is simply called "Free music collection" and it contains 8 newer and technically better songs like "Riders, unite!" and "Andact".

Free to download - free to share!

My original plan was to release my own albums on iTunes, something I have got numerous requests for. But the music has always been free, and I won't complicate things by changing that. All the mentioned albums will be made available for free on my music pages once I get everything in order. It will probably be about 80 songs in total. Until then, you can download the TSEC album from this site - or you can head over to The Pirate Bay where my own two albums are already available. Download them if you want to, and feel free to share them with your friends. And please let me know if you find something that you enjoy!

You can also download or stream a few songs from PureVolume page if you are not familiar with TPB and torrent downloads. If you miss some specific song there, let me know and I'll upload it. And just to remind you: I have now teamed up with Joakim Persson and thereby turned the Leeloo Project into a new and fresh duo - and we will soon launch our band website where you will be able to download a free promo releases that will make my old songs sound completely silly. To be continued!