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I was born in 1987 in Copenhagen, Denmark. When I was roughly 10 months old my parents moved to midwest Sweden where I still reside today.
My father was Gordon Sorber, my mother is Berit Vind. I am the youngest of seven children (two full blood siblings, four half-blood). In chronological order: Fredrik, Katrine, Ulrik, Signe, Lone, Nikolaj and Me.
I am a dual citizen of the United States and Denmark.
Now here's the story all about how my life got flip turned upside down:
When I was eleven years old, I managed to buy my very own Amiga 500 with the Workbench OS and quite a few games and programs on it, among the applications one of note: ProTracker 4. This program was the first Digital Audio Workstation I ever used and though quite a simple application by todays standards (delivering slightly above chiptune quality) it was still amazing to me.
The power to compose my very own melodies was intriguing to me and I stayed with the idea, making horrid little excuses for chip music until I finally made the transition to FastTracker II, a windows-based tracker. I stayed with FT2 for quite some time until in 2003 I switched over to ModPlug Tracker 1.16, a highly superior tracker in every aspect. Everything from then on until early 2008 was made with ModPlug and Antidestiny was the absolute maximum I managed to squeeze out of ModPlug, though I'm quite sure it can deliver more.
In 2008 I moved on to Renoise and with it, a world of musical creation I had not ever experienced was unlocked. I made only a few tracks now and then through it but soon decided to remake one of my tracks called "Eternity's End" which resulted in Ultima Eternus, my greatest completed undertaking yet.
However, I'm leaving out quite important aspects of my childhood so let me go back to 1994.
I'm 7 or 8, can't remember which. My parents divorced when I was three years old so every other weekend I would go stay with my father along with my brother, Nikolaj and my sister, Lone. Both of them older than me
My mothers villa burned to the ground during that weekend and while my mother and her man escaped unharmed, everything in there was lost. My sister cried, sad to lose all her clothes. My brother upset about his collection of stuffed animals. Me quietly contemplating the loss of my most treasured possession: My GameBoy. Such was my mind.
Had we not been at our dad's over that weekend, none of us would've been alive today.
I'm telling you this to get to the first of a series of truly destructive experiences of my life that ultimately leads to who I am today and where my musical creativity to a rather large part comes from.
I mentioned my mother's man but allow me to go into detail. His name is Bengt Eriksson and he was every level of failure a man could possible amount to. He was never physically abusive, but he was a total control-obsessed alcoholic and a bitter dead-hearted coward.
For many years us kids suffered and my mother tried several times to break away but as is known about these situations, it is never as easy as simply walking away. He roped her back in, and the cycle repeated itself until my sister and brother sequentially moved out and away from our little hometown. I remained, too young to live on my own and filled with a mix of intense hatred and terror. I was trapped with this man.
I spent as much time as I could at a friend of mines, playing videogames and PnP roleplaying games, among other activities. Escapism was really the only way to deal with him.
However, something happened when I was 15 which not only broke his stranglehold on my family, but shattered it completely.
Lone committed suicide on the 24th of January, 2003. Nikolaj's 18th birthday. The story behind this I will not get into. This was impossible to comprehend at first and I just drifted into a bubble without really dealing with it properly, not that there really is a proper way to do so in the first place.
In 2006, my father was diagnosed with prostate-cancer and started getting treatments. My mother had met a great guy from Iceland named Arni who became a pretty good friend of mine as well. He died in a car crash as a result of a bleed in his brain while driving on impulse late one night to see my mother. Another series of hard blows to deal with.
In 2008, I had a mental breakdown and went psychotic. I was diagnosed as Schizo-affective and medicated for a while during which my father passed away. I felt almost nothing as this happened and to this day have not yet felt anything I would consider a valid emotional response to this.
I slipped back into a manic psychosis again as well as a manic depression, both of which during 2009.
When I made the first and second parts of Ultima Eternus, I was to a high degree very VERY psychotic. Paranoid delusions, bizarre philosophical and scientific theories with little to no foundation in logic or reason, severe sleepdeprivation, lack of eating, and so forth...
When I got that schizo-affective diagnosis I decided after some time to fight it. To prove to the doctors or atleast to myself that those two parts where not the result of of a disorder of the mind but of my own will. I composed a third, remade the second completely from scratch, made a fourth, and finally in 2010 made the final fifth part which stands as the single most important one of them all since I was declared healthy not long after its completion.
Of course, healthy is to be taken with a grain of salt. It's never been stated that I am NOT in a dormant schizophrenic state, and my diagnosis was only CHANGED to bipolar disorder. One does not exclude the other. I also two diagnoses for neuro-psychological conditions known as "ADHD Predominantly Inattentive" (aka ADD) and "Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified" (PPD-NOS).
So maybe not healthy, but atleast I'm not marked down as schizophrenic anymore which was a victory to me, nevertheless.
So in truth, Ultima Eternus was more to me than simply music. It's my bottled emotions, my struggle with hardships, my fight against my own broken psyche, my mind in musical form.
The final treatment I recieved for my psychological issues was sadly Electro-Convulsive Therapy which while getting me out of a state of near catatonia, severely crippled my emotional spectrum and destroyed what little was left of who I used to be before that day in 2003.
So now I define myself through my music alone since it's really all I have left of myself now. I still laugh and I have fleeting moments of joy, but most of the time what people around me see is just me playing along with the moment. I don't feel at all as much as I once did and it's a bleak grey existence at times but I am alive and I haven't yet reached the pinnacle of my abilities so I'll continue to strive towards that.
The only thing I really want now though is love, sappy as it might sound.
So to not end this on such a dark note, how about some quick facts about me?
My name: Rasmus Sorber
Date of birth: 28th August, 1987 (I was born and raised in Europe, deal with it.)
Residence: Ekshärad, Sweden
Religion: None.
Political views: Nonpartisan.
Philosophies: I've found that the only real truth that stands unflinched in the face of any critique is that we are born and that we will die. Anything before, in between or afterwards is mostly just speculation at best.
Videogames I enjoy: Too many to mention, but I've been an avid gamer since I was 3 or 4 years old.
Movies I enjoy: Also too many. I watch on average 150-200 movies per year.
Music I enjoy: Sigh, this is getting old... Waaaayyy too many different artists and bands.
Hopes and dreams: Love. (Gaydars worldwide are going apeshit...)
I think thats about it. If you have any questions, fire away with the comment button and I'll answer as soon as I read it.
