Who is ArchAngel?

I am a happy fellow from Sweden who has been creating music with my computer since I was 11 years old. The music is often melodic ambient — I sometimes compare it to film music. The last couple of years I have unfortunately not been active in the demo-scene.

Before we continue, I just want to state again that I am the music artist from Sweden, not to be confused with the artist from Norway with the same nick name. Back in 1995 I did not know he existed when I chose my nick name (beg your pardons Rony Nilssen - Norwegian Archangel).

And if you have no idea of what the demo-scene is, scroll down to the lingo explanation for further assistance ;).

Brief summary

Real name:	Nils Ingvarsson
Birth date:	1980.05.17
Born in:	Sollefteå, Sweden (north)
Living in:	Jönköping, Sweden (south)
Marital status:	Married to the love of my life My beautiful wife Elin. (The sun rays are not added)

Tracker lingo - it's all gibberish to me

The "demo-scene", "demos", "mods" and "tracking" might be unfamiliar terms to you. There are no quick explanations, but to make you understand somewhat more, music has been created on computers for a long time. Before the first PC saw morning's first light, there was already music and multi media presentations created on early computers such as the C64, Amiga and Atari.

Creating tracker music with a special software is called tracking (the software is actually called a "tracker") . The actual songs are called mods (short for "modules") and if the music is combined with some moving graphical production, a demo is created. The stage for all this is called the demo-scene which is not a physical stage but more of a community.

My tracking music history

I've been tagging along with my music creation since 1991.
I started out with the Atari and "Noice Tracker", then changed to Amiga 500 and "Pro Tracker". After that I used the PC486 and Fast Tracker 2 and today when I'm tracking I use "Skale Tracker", which is an FT2 replica but with tons of new functions and it works well with new Windows platforms.

My tracking got more serious around 1996 when the Trax in Space tracker community grew larger. During the late 90's I developed mostly within the ambient genre. Unfortunately the TIS tracker community had to close down.

My artist nick history

When I first started out using Noice Tracker, I didn't have any nick name since I really didn't understand much about the scene then. I was only 10 years or so. 1991 when I changed to Amiga I heard about other people spreading their tunes on BBSes and they used nicks, and of course I too needed a nick. My brother thought of "ICQ" which was supposed to mean "I Seek You" (with my music). No, The chat program ICQ didn't exist back then, so it was not a rip-off =). I thought it was catchy and meant something thoughtful, and so ICQ it was.

I released a few tunes as ICQ, but it didn't last very long until I changed to Zyrax in 1993, which I remember I thought was much cooler than ICQ. Not as "deep" and meaningsful though... It was not until end of 1995 (with the release of the tune called Vision) when I changed to ArchAngel, which I've kept ever since.

Why the nick ArchAngel?

No, it's not from the Airwolf TV-series. It's actually from an old PC game called Master of Magic. Imagine Civilization but swap Masonry and Theory of Gravity for 6 different schools of magic and lots of spells in each school. I played it when I was around 14 and got inspired by one of the units. I chose that name as nick but wrote it with capital A's.