Frédéric Motte

(Biography from official site.)

El Mobo was born in 1970 in the North of France, somewhere between Singapore and Ottawa. French music is rather boring, but El Mobo had the chance to be raised by hippies, who were listening to american flower power music, and a bit later, 70's hard rock. His father was a drummer, and his mother was.. well... a drummer's wife. So very soon, El Mobo found himself very interested in music. But as he was very lazy, he decided it was too hard to take music lessons. Listening to his parents records made him happy enough for quite a while.

In 1983, his parents bought a computer. It was an ORIC-1, an incredibly powerful machine with 48 (fourty-eight!) Kb of RAM, a 8 colors palette, a hires mode, and sound chip able to play square signals on 3 channels at the same time !!! El Mobo very quickly learned how to program this beast, and started to compose simple tunes coded in Basic. 2 years later, he convinced his parents to sell this machine and buy a new generation computer : the brand new ORIC-ATMOS, an incredibly powerful machine with 48 (fourty-eight!) Kb of RAM, a 8 colors palette, a hires mode, and sound chip able to play square signals on 3 channels at the same time !!! Hmmm.. right...

After this smart move, he managed to sell the ATMOS and bought a Commodore 64 + floppy drive. Then, he fell in love with video game music. While his skool mates were listening to "Take on me" by A-ha, or "The Reflex" by 2xDuran, he was listening to "Monty on the Run" by Rob Hubbard (who??), or "Radar Rat Race" by Martin Galway (what??). He soon became what you could call a "nerd", collecting games and listening to computer music...

In 1985 and 1986 summers, he worked as a programmer in a small local company, to make a bit of money in order to buy a new computer. At the end of the summer 1986, he was able to buy an Amiga 500, an incredibly powerful machine with 512 Kb of RAM, a 4096 color palette, and a sound chip able to play 8bits samples on 4 channels in stereo! And this was the beginning.

In 1990, thanks to his training in demos, he got his first contract in the Video Game industry to produce his first game soundtrack. The game was called No-Exit and was released by Coktel Vision on PC, Amiga, Atari ST and Amstrad CPC... Then he had a few other contracts, and in 1991, he decided to leave the university to start making a living on game music. As long as he would get enough money to pay the rent and buy some beer, he would be happy... Besides, he kept on doing music for demos, and reached the 1st position in most computer musicians charts of the moment... He was starting to be really famous in the demo-scene...

But when you join a demo group, you have to find yourself a handle. For days and days, he looked for a handle. He had to find a name which wasn't common at all. He didn't want to be the 134th "Terminator", the 86th "Fred" or the 2nd "Mwaba". So he came up with a really stupid handle: MOBY. Yeah, who would be stupid enough to choose the same ridiculous handle?? Not me... And for years, he composed numerous tunes for Amiga demos for various demo-groups. He slowly started to make a reputation for himself. His tunes were getting better and better as the years were passing by...

Thanks to this machine and Soundtracker, an incredible piece of musical program coded by Karsten Obarski, he started to compose sample based music. His first tries were simply pathetic, but slowly he started to learn by himself the basics of music theory. But what's the point in composing music if there's nobody to listen to it ? So, after a couple of years of training, he joined a "demo group". Basically, a demo group is group of people willing to show off their abilities in different technical or artistic areas. The programmer exhibits his coding abilities by showing his routines. The graphic artist displays pictures, logos or animations. The musician plays his tunes. Put all these things together and you get a kind of music video, played on a computer... This is what we called a "demo".

In 1992, he bought a crap bass from a friend, because he wanted to give it a try... and he fell in love with this instrument... slapping day and night...

But in 1994, El Mobo (the artist then known as Moby) started to work as in-house musician/sound designer at Atreid Concept, a video game developer... His job was taking all his available time, so he had to leave the demo-scene...

Later on, Atreid Concept became Kalisto Entertainment, and El Mobo stayed at the head of their Audio Department for quite a while. He composed the soundtrack of all their games.

He had to drop his old handle "MOBY" because he started to release music outside of the game and demo scene, and as you all know, there's finally some stupid ass who choosed the same handle to release his commercial music...

In 1998, El Mobo and some friends formed "Plug-in", an instrumental guitar rock band, in which he plays the bass. He produced their first EP in 1999. He's also working on an electro-ambient album.

In January 2001, fed up with the lack of fame and naked women in his daily duties, El Mobo left his job at Kalisto in order to start his own business. 2001 saw the birth of Elmobo Studio, which should give him the time to work on all his solo and band projects, as well as on other exciting things like movies, DVDs, and of course video games...