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My name is Johan Hjort, but I am known to most as Hjorten. I was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1983.
I live by myself in a two-room apartment not very far from the center of Uppsala.
I am the founder of deersound which is an independent label mainly releasing CDR and MP3.
This biography is in no way meant to be complete. It's more of a rough document on what music I grew up with, and how my different projects came to be.
The first album I owned was Stakka Bo's Supermarket, and when I bought Green Day's Dookie in 1994 it radically changed my taste in music. It lead me into The Offspring and Nirvana, which eventually got me into Kiss in 1996. In 1997 I heard Marilyn Manson for the first time, and it became my favorite group for many years.
And it was around that time I started getting into making music of my own. A classmate had a copy of Dance eJay which he lent me, and we both started making music based on the loops and sounds supplied in the program. I briefly made a couple of songs in FastTracker 2 with two other friends, but never really got into the tracker scene.
Nothing really amounted out of the eJay songs, but I've still got them on a harddrive somewhere, and for some reason I put the music making on hold for quite some time.
After Marilyn Manson, I got into Rammstein, Clawfinger and Slipknot, but I also enjoyed Kraftwerk and Hallucinogen. Eventually I widened my taste and started getting into death metal, but it's no longer my favorite genre, even if I enjoy it on occasion.
Aphex Twin's Come to daddy introduced me to the more electronic and experimental music, but also the more ambient sides of his works. And from there I started looking for similar artists, and at the same time I got back into Hallucinogen and psytrance.
Around 2005 I heard 5F_55 for the first time, and it was so different from anything I had heard before. It took a long time before my ears were used to the noise, but once they were I started looking for noise and that's when I found Merzbow. And with him, my own interest in making noise started.
In April of 2006 I armed myself with a tiny computer microphone and two lousy computer speakers and started making noise as O2FN. It was basically distorted screaming and feedback, after a couple of mp3 demos and two CDR's I declared the project defunct.
However, before O2FN was ended I started another project which was based on movie samples and cut up beats. The name of it was Indirekt defekt and I made a handful of songs that never amounted to anything except being uploaded to a small website of mine. The project was declared dead after about two or three months.
h: was the name of the next project and it ended with its first and only CDR. Musically it can be seen as what was about to come.
The first release as Hjorten, Ljudterrorism, was feedback oriented and didn't really prepare for the second release which was more of digital noise with parts of ambient. The following two releases were also more towards noise, and I started thinking about coming up with a name I could release the noise as. And that's when Reversed Obesity was born.
The differences between the two projects made it possible for me to experiment a lot, and the first "real" release as Hjorten was a rather abstract EP on Two Left Hands On Two Right Arms which was made entirely based on the sounds of applause.
After the abstract EP I started getting more into ambient and the following releases are a proof of that, though on occasion there is a hint of noise in the tracks.
In April of 2009 I introduced a new project, You Are Ten. It was created because I played around with genres I had never before touched, namely breakcore and IDM. It's probable that it might not ever be used again, but one can't be completely sure.
With the release of 018: Experimental I used Johan Hjort for the first time when it came to music.