What are your general influences?
TL;DRThe composer's main influence was the Commodore Amiga, where he first wrote music with a tracker, along with his father's love of classical music and games, and he recommends learning classical harmony by hand.
You were just talking a little bit about it with the old Commodore Amiga games.
Oh, in that regard. Well, for games, I was really, really into... I started with the Spectrum, then I changed to Commodore 64, which I liked a lot. But then when I was on the Amiga, I think that was the most influence, that really influenced me. One of the things I really enjoyed about the Commodore Amiga is the fact that at some point I got a cover disc from a magazine which was called Amiga Format and it came with OctaMED Pro, which was a tracker, and that's when I started writing music with that. I remember I enjoyed a lot doing music in that. My father heard my first track only because he passed away a bit after; he had cancer. But he heard my first track on OctaMED Pro and he enjoyed it. He loved video games, by the way. Sometimes I imagine how he would react if he saw what I'm doing now. Also, one of the games he enjoyed was Wing Commander from Chris Roberts.
He was always a very caring father, had his things, but with me, with kids, he was very protective and he really loved everyone. But it's curious because he loved music, he loved classical music, so there's no doubt that being exposed to very well selected music that he used to play was important. I think it was very important to me. Of course, after that, I didn't come up and say, hey, I want to be a video game composer, or just a film composer or something like that. It's great, but I wanted to learn music. So I went to classical. So I think everyone should, at least for a bit, try to learn and write music by hand. For example, before the show I was searching, I don't know if you can see this, but this is one of the exercises for Bach chorales. It's a very great exercise to exercise harmony and it's important because far too often, with today's technology, it's far too easy to make something sound cool, but sounding cool doesn't mean it sounds meaningful. And I think it's great when you make it also sound meaningful and also have a nice and correct harmony that makes everything just sound polished. I think that's important, so it's something I try to do in everything I write. And I think learning properly, at least for a bit, can make a difference, especially if you enjoy writing for orchestra. Of course, there are other routes that can be used, and they are all very good, but I feel it doesn't hurt if you can nowadays.