Hi, let me introduce myself. My name is Frank Johansen and I am a composer/writer.
I was born in 1981 in Sweden; however my mother is from Norway and my father is the one from Sweden. My mother chose for me to be a Norwegian citizen and hey! I guess I still am, although I see myself more as a world citizen because I view the whole world as one place for us all.
From a young age we moved around a lot and when we lived in Sweden for about 5 years I was introduced by friends to the world of videogames and it changed my life. It was an amazing feeling to play as fictional characters and later I began listening to the amazing soundtracks from games such as Secret of Mana, Castlevania and Super R-type. I also grew attached to Movie soundtracks from an early age when I was introduced to movies like Conan the barbarian, Rambo, Star wars and Terminator.
I have always had the ability to dive into movies and video games as if I myself was there.
I don’t just play games; I live them, the story, the characters the emotions.
I began to play electric guitar when I was 15 and my main focus was on the rhythm guitar. Listening to the amazing riffs from early Metallica and Megadeth as well as Slayer, Pantera and Sepultura boosted my inspiration to play.
It wasn’t until we moved for the last time when I was 16 that I really got settled.
I went to art school and my mind began to look beyond what you see and formulate meanings behind the decisions you make. At this time my interest for Conan the barbarian and Spawn comics began.
The first ideas began to take form towards creating my own ultimate RPG video game.

My guitar skills began to evolve and I got my first microphone which I put up in the basement where I used to scream my heart out as I played the new ESP Esplorer “James Hetfield copy” guitar. At this time my brother had become extremely interested in playing electric guitar as well and I showed him everything I knew and he developed quickly. I can remember us playing together in the basement. My first visions of maybe forming a band began to take form and as my brother’s skills developed he began to focus more on lead solos. We then recorded a 2 song demo with me on vocals at my sister’s father’s house in Sweden. The two tracks were titled Hatred and Confusion, which I still have on a CD somewhere hehe.
This was also a magical time for videogames. I had bought my first playstation and began playing games like Alundra, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX.
The music of these great games blew me away as well as the immense and emotional storylines.
However I soon applied for a 1 year Rock school that went on a mini-tour with original made tunes by the students. It was a decision that I felt I had to make just to test if my skills were good enough to focus my entire life on.

I hated the notes and music theory lessons hahaha. I have taught myself and notes and such was a waste of time and effort. During that year I came to the conclusion that music is what I wanted to focus on in my life. My roommate introduced me to the possibilities of creating music using software on a computer and it blew my mind. I thought WOW! But when I never found anyone to really make songs with at the school I thought back on my brother who was sitting at home, just having fun with his guitar beginning to blast Pantera riffs and developing his solo skills. Hatred and Confusion came to mind and it hit me that my brother was the one whom I wanted to form a band with.

When I got back home, peace was short-lived as I got called into the army for my obligatory one year. Can’t say I was happy about that. When I got in I quickly got myself out by choosing to serve civil duty instead.
I had to move to Trondheim to serve as an assistant at a school and this year became a loooong one. During this year I got my dad’s old computer and crappy midi software, but before long it all crashed and the rest of the year I spent most of my time listening to music and playing video games. During this year I felt that I needed to find some new bands that really kicked ass. I had been buying a lot of crap just based on the opening track on albums that usually was the only good track. I discovered bands like Blind Guardian, symphony X, Gamma Ray, Stratovarius and Queensryche. I felt that my mind was expanding, searching for uniqueness and finding myself enjoying longer songs and arrangements that didn’t repeat too much. This was where Blind Guardian and Symphony X stood out and climbed to the top of my fav band list together with Helloween, Metallica and Megadeth. I practiced my singing more when I suddenly noticed that my vibrato came easy and it became really fun to sing.

When my “punishment” was over I could finally return home and our path towards creating our own music could begin to take shape.
We got our hands on a computer and a few software programs and began our journey through the world of music and music programming. We dove into music and A LOT of videogames the following year. However my brother had school which seemed to suck a lot of life force from him as well as me so it went slow with the music and we played more games.
We dove into the past and present playing games like Final fantasy III-VI, Star ocean 2, Breath of fire V, Grandia II, Chrono trigger, Chrono cross and my personal favourite JRPG series Arc the lad.

As the year went by and we managed to complete 2 new tracks called Mighty science and Awakening meant to be included in a musical story project called The Dark Era with me on vocals.
Our vision of music had begun to take form in original ideas and we developed our ideal of music, the thought was: Only create the best parts, no filler parts that really didn’t do any thing for the song. Basically only focus on parts that had equal greatness, to accurately explain our philosophy I will use Metallica as an example. If you take the intro to master of puppets, the mid riff from Blackend and the die by my hand part from Creeping death followed by through the never mid break part and slam them into one song you will get something that really blows your mind. So we made that way of thinking our basic formula.
And or goals became to make the best original music for our ears.

After my brother quit school we found ourselves in a position of choice, what did we really want to do with our music? We still didn’t have a band and we had gotten a reply from Nuclear blast that they were interested in hearing more from us in the future but they didn’t have the capacity to sign anymore bands at that time.

But as we reflected on the situation we found ourselves less willing to be a band that travels around playing live. We are all about the music and giving every part of it its full attention.
We began to think about the media we loved most, video games. Video games such as the JRPG’s have great stories and amazing music and we began to move in that direction.
We created two separate websites that would promote our original instrumental compositions which included city/town themes and battle tracks. Time passed by as we evolved and we learned that the road could be less honourable as it seemed that the way in would have to be as apprentice musician or as something totally different. This was not something we agreed with and we felt that the music we had on our websites did not do our current level of skills justice so they were shut down.

Leaving the thought of ever becoming a band our ambitions grew larger as we wanted to create our on visions. We began our first thoughts on solo projects but they never really took form as community began pressuring us to get jobs.
After taking a few courses and quitting a job as an assistant at a local school I together with my brother managed to get a small job at a used furniture store.
The man in charge there was supportive of our efforts with music.
While we were there we discussed what we should do in the future and we thought that video game music was our way so we began an epic project of remaking Final Fantasy tracks spanning from I-IX in our own vision if we ever had the opportunity to remake the music to one of the games.
While in the middle of this project I also had been working on and evolving my video game idea I had back when I was still in school, the vision of the perfect RPG series for me.
It grew larger and larger and I felt that it was not a one man job and I knew that the only one who could join me in this effort that had the same goals and ideals and a mind that could only add more to the mix was my brother Dan Johansen. I introduced my ideas to him and since then it has become a 50/50 effort and our life goal to see it completed.
The manager at the store we worked at let us work on the details at work when there were no costumers present.
With the Final Fantasy History project completed we sent it in to Square but they never answered but we waited and waited. We later got the information that square only worked from the inside and no outsiders were let in. With this information the FF History project was put on the back burner and we focused all our energy into writing the first script for our epic RPG. With the vision of our dream RPG series in mind we dove into our own fantasy world.
Halfway through we began composing the soundtrack and with the goal of creating the best music for our ears, I also started to draw some character designs based on our ideas. At the end we had written approximately 620 script pages for the game (this would amount to around 1000 regular movie script pages) and recorded over 3 hours for the soundtrack. But we still didn’t have the complete design documents and we felt like trying something else for a while. So we began to write a movie called Influx that we entered a competition. We were disqualified because we didn’t follow the correct form.
We are rebels and we don’t really like following set rules so that script was put aside for the time being and we began working on a second movie script. This one was not meant for any competition but we followed the rules of movie scripts this time and it worked out for the better actually. We thought that maybe we could sell it and began to send out the script to a few companies but we didn’t get our hopes up, we knew that both our movies would kick ass so confident we moved on.

Still with nothing officially completed we thought that we would put out the Final Fantasy project for free downloading on a website because we felt that ppl might want to listen to it but we didn’t expect anything.
So we created the website www.thedualdragons.com and uploaded all our tracks there.
Later we created a youtube account (FrankDanJohansen) where we posted videos we made for some of the tracks and people who listened to the music really liked it and it gave us good feelings so we continued to make remakes for other games and added them to the website.

By this time I was really getting into Dream theater and Pain of salvation and I began to experiment even more with my music, always trying to create the best music for my ears.

Eventually we found a website called www.gamedev.net and we thought that maybe we could make something happen here as composers and we are still working on that part.
But by now we really wanted to release original music, no more working behind the scenes.
It was time to step up and deliver some kick ass music.
However loose tracks did not sit well with us so we decided to do concepts and release two solo albums. And now they are released!

We are currently active on Ocremix.org and we will continue our efforts towards creating our own vision of the perfect RPG series.

I/We want to thank you all for showing interest in our music and what we are all about.

My thoughts:

Music is the most personal thing for me, because I believe it puts your soul on display for everyone to see.
The concepts created come from the heart of the composer.
It should give the composer the feeling of his/her inner vibes and no one can take that away.