February 12, 2008

For the past few weeks, Game Chronicles has been featuring some of the newest upcoming music acts making it into EA top-selling games via their own EA Trax gaming audio division and the EA/Nettwerk collaborative record label Artwerk.

This time around, EA serves up a veritable old-timer to the gaming music scene in a Dutch electronic composer named Tom Holkenborg, who just happens to be known as the prodigious Junkie XL – one of the most recognizable names in gaming soundtracks today.

Veteran gamers will remember seeing Junkie XL (or JXL for short) featured all the way back in 1995 in little-known upstart racing title called The Need For Speed. Over the years, JXL has been featured in a number of EA games, including nearly every Need For Speed sequel since 1995, The Sims 2: Nightlife, Burnout Legend, SSX Blur, FIFA 08, and more. To top it off, JXL has also been featured in a number of other non-EA games, including time-honored favorite Test Drive 5, Quantum Redshift, God Of War 2, Forza Motorsport, and the list goes on.

But JXL isn’t confined to game soundtracks – he has relocated from his home in the Netherlands off to sunny California, where he now lends his talents to scoring films, with soundtracks to Blade, The Matrix, Resident Evil, The Beach, Catwoman, Team America, Dead or Alive, and Blind already under his belt. GCM was recently given an exclusive chance to toss a few questions at Mr. Holkenborg and ask him about his career and his music and how the future looks for him with the recently formed Artwerk.

GCM: You are originally from The Netherlands – working mostly out of Amsterdam – but recently relocated to Venice, California to be nearer the hub of the music and film industries. How are you taking to the California – are you enjoying it?

JXL: Yeah, it is really good – completely different than Amsterdam, obviously. I really like the climate here, I really like the people on the beach area – it’s a completely different vibe than in Hollywood. It’s a really nice mellow vibe, it’s a really Mediterranean lifestyle – people take time to have lunch, and they go out to dinner really late, and it’s all really mellow. I really like that. And then at the same time there is this killer music industry where everything needs to be done yesterday and that kind of mentality going on at the same time, which is funny. I do miss Amsterdam, but for my career, being here is amazing.

GCM: We have been looking at some younger newcomer bands over the past few weeks – but you are an old timer in the gaming music scene, with tracks going all the way back to the original Need For Speed title, over 13 years ago. That means that you came into the gaming industry right when companies like EA were just beginning to entertain including licensed music in their titles. How did you manage to become one of the top audio artists for games and music 13 years later?

JXL: Well, at that point it was just requests for one or two songs, or maybe a custom made song. Back in the day, we weren’t talking about interactive music at all – it was just a track to be looped in play mode. At the same time I started making music for movies and started getting more and more attention – especially when I became involved with The Matrix (films and games).

I came out to California to work on the Matrix, and the Music Supervisor for the Matrix movie trilogy and game, Jason Bentley, became a good friend of mine and asked if I ever considered moving out here to be closer to the industry. So eventually I did, and it was one of the best choices I made in my life.

As soon as I got here – like four and half years ago – I got really tied into the movie and the game industry, and obviously the contact with EA Games warmed up and then I started doing full games for them. Like with Need For Speed, where I did the full interactive score, and a couple of tracks for the soundtrack – but something like that is a three to six-month workload.

GCM: Speaking of interactive scores, some games like EA’s SSX series feature interactive background music that seamlessly changes in intensity to reflect the action onscreen. How is it done? Do you have to lay multiple tracks layers for each intensity level, and then stack them on top of each other, stepping up or down to suit the action?

JXL: Well, there are a different ways of doing it – here are companies that work with multiple tracks playing at the same time and you switch back and forth, other programs actually switch out audio files.

Really, it gets rather complicated, and not as simple as just recording a couple of different tracks – when you are composing you have to think that at any moment you have to be ready to switch to another track, so we have to think about things like transition files and overlay files and stuff like that. It takes a lot of thinking not only on the technical end, but also on the musical end so that once the music plays it flows naturally, and not choppy and all over the place.

GCM: Over the years, you have been one of the most recognizable names in gaming music, with music featured in a slew of EA games. What were your initial thoughts when EA first announced its EA Trax division, and were you surprised when they recently teamed up with Nettwerk to form the new Artwerk label?

JXL: I think it is a pretty natural process [for EA], you know? There are a couple of people at EA games that are really smart – Steve Schnur and Cybele Pettus – and they really know what they are talking about and are really ahead of the game.

The coolest thing is that a video game company or publisher like EA might not be a traditional record company so to speak, but they can feature all the music for purchase through their sites. It makes perfect sense, because if a kid is playing a game and says “Damn, I like that track”, how cool is it that with the press of a button it can be downloaded from a site somewhere? It's really cool.

From a business model point of view, I believe that typically most people buy things on the spur of the moment – at least if I look at myself, that’s how it is. That’s why I buy a lot of stuff from Apple, because they have that 1-Click Buy which is very scary and dangerous when you drink a couple of beers and at two in the morning you look at the new laptop coming out and “Oops, shit, I just ordered it…”. You don’t realize how quickly it goes.

So, if every time you wanted a track you had to go through two or three pages of registration, or go out in the car and drive to the CD shop – then the whole vibe is lost, the spirit is gone and that track will probably never be bought.

So [for EA] to have a record label, and a website, and a One-Click, are all really smart – for the label, for the artist, and for the customers. EA Trax and Artwerk are a little different because EA Trax is the record label that releases music primarily from video games. So if I produce a score for SSX or Need for Speed, it will be released on EA Trax. But having all this knowledge on how to promote music and how to take distribution to a whole new level, they decided to partner up with a traditional record company, Artwerk.

At the end of the day, Artwerk it is a traditional record company, but one that benefits from the knowledge that EA has as far as sharing music, using music for films or games, ringtones, etc. and how money should be made from that stuff. It’s a totally different view from the traditional record company. That is why I fight with traditional record companies, and why I was the first artist to sign with Artwerk last year.

GCM: Now that you are signed to Artwerk, does that mean that you can only collaborate on EA-branded games, or will you still be able to lay tracks for other developers like SCEA and Microsoft?

JXL: Absolutely. I am signed to Artwerk to deliver artist albums, but I am not signed as an in-house EA composer. So while EA often comes to me for music, I can make music for any company that I like.

GCM: You are also branching out into movie soundtracks. I know you often lend full songs to the films, but have you also had a hand in composing backing beats and ambient music to films and games?

JXL: Yes, that’s called the score. In some movies I might do one or two scenes, sometimes the whole movie – it all depends.

GCM: It looks like you are also laying tracks for a number of game-to-movie crossover films like Dead or Alive or Resident Evil. In those instances, do you try to use the original game soundtracks and/or theme music for source material?

JXL: It totally depends, but usually it’s a completely different thing – basically, when you talk about a film like Dead or Alive for instance, the original music was very traditional Japanese archive. That doesn’t work in a movie, because there are different things that we need to underscore other than just being a killing machine. So usually you just take it from scratch.

In fact, usually it’s the other way around. When you do a James Bond videogame based on a movie, then you are stuck to one of the themes that makes James Bond, James Bond – so usually it’s the other way around.

GCM: You perform roughly 40 to 50 live shows a year. That averages roughly one a week – which might not sound like a lot, but it can be quite grueling. First, how do you keep up the pace, and second how does a one-man electronic show play out on stage? Is most of the music pre-recorded, or do you try to recreate the composition onstage?

I bring computers, some synths, and a mixing desk and I jam around. I have all my songs with me broken down into little parts and also some of the stuff I did for videogames – I just throw in all of those tracks, and its all a little bit on the go, you know?

There are different gigs for different locations –I did a Need For Speed tour in Japan and Australia and there were a lot of gaming kids there, and for those kids I would say they get bored after thirty seconds. So, I threw in a lot of fast musical changes and they really liked it. And if you play in a club environment, transitions between songs are long and slow, but then you go to Coachella (like I am playing in April) and you play for more like a rock-alternative crowd and you can really bang it out.

And that’s the beauty of playing live is that you can open a song and make it work more for different crowds.

GCM: Over the years you have become known for a number of remixes, covers, and collaborations with the likes of Gary Numan, Chuck D, Robert Smith, Dave Gahan, even Britney Spears and Elvis. When you do these covers and remixes, do you have direct interaction with these musicians, or is most of the collaboration done long distance?

That completely depends on the purpose of the track, where the artist is based, and the level of commitment that you want to put in to really make it work. Usually when I work on a Britney Spears track it is nearly impossible to hook up with her and sit down for six hours and figure out what’s the best way to turn the track around, you know.

But when you work with some of the other people, they are way more into that kind of stuff. When I worked with Gary Numan, he took the time to come to Amsterdam and he stayed a couple of weekends – that’s awesome.

But we are living in an world of digital technology, with iChat, Skype, and broadband internet and all – one person can be singing in LA, and I can be recording it live in Amsterdam while seeing a person scream at me – beautiful, isn’t it?

GCM: Your latest track featured in our current favorite EA game, Burnout Paradise, is Cities in Dust – a cover of the classic Siouxsie and the Banshees song from 1985. Ironically, my wife had recently tasked me with finding a copy of the original for a girlfriend’s Christmas gift and I had forgotten how great and timeless the song really is. You do a great job capturing the spirit of the original without sounding dated. Is it a cover or a remix, and what drove you to hit on Cities in Dust after all these years?

It’s a cover, and I found this girl named Lauren Rocket who has this really typical voice, but at points she really sounds like Siouxsie, so its cool. The beauty of it is sometimes you find a track like this that was a massive track back then but was completely forgotten and nobody has done anything with it – which I was totally surprised by.

One day I was having dinner with a friend at a place in LA and the track came on and we kind of looked at each other at once and said “that’s it, that’s the cover we need!” So we did some background research and couldn’t find any remixes or any rerecording of that song – which baffled me because what 80’s song hadn’t been touched yet. I mean, most of them have been remixed or messed up and this one hadn’t.

GCM: Well, Tom, it has been a great pleasure talking with you and we definitely look forward to hearing more from Junkie XL in the future. Good luck with the work, and hopefully we can catch you on the next tour. In the meantime, I’m gonna go and One-Click some Junkie XL.

You can also get more info about Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg), find tour dates, and listen/purchase select tunes at JXL's official website or on JXL's MySpace page.