BIOGRAPHY

A Blue Ocean Dream is a music solo studio project by Owe Emfestav, from Gävle in Sweden. The music can be described as electronic pop, electropop or synthpop...
Owe started to make music in the early 80s, influenced by Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode. He participated on a couple of Swedish synth compilations, until he finally came with he´s first own release, "the Sea" 2002.
The follow up "electric" came as a result of making "a real release" from the studies of a musicproduction education Owe took in 2004. The "electric album contain more pop influenced music than the ambient sea album.
2005 A Blue Ocean Dream came in contact with Todd Durrant at the American synthpop label
A Different Drum. "On the road to wisdom" was the first record deal release for ABOD, and it got good reviews in e-zines like the Spanish site sonidobscuro.com and the English hard-wired.org.uk.

A Blue Ocean Dream Is now back with a new Album, released as download in October 2008.
The title "Father to son" is the same as the first track on the cd, and it reveals a more mature sound with stronger lyrics, and dancable beats, taking abod to higher level.

It started way back in the late 70´ties, my musical interest was born when I first heard Kraftwerk "she´s a model" on the radio, (you really couldn´t hear "new" music on the Swedish radio at this time, so you had to tune in Radio Luxemburg) This was something completely different from what I´ve heard before, & it got my attention and woke my interest for synthesizers. I didn´t have a recordplayer, but I still bought Depeche Modes "speak & spell" album when it came in 1981. The recordshop was in an appartment in the small town I went to school in, you just knocked on the door, said the name of the record and they would search the shelfes along the walls, and if you were lucky they found it !. My best friend Tobbe, had a stereo, so I could record the LP´s to tape, and listen to them at home on my cassetteplayer.

In 1983 I got my first synthesizer, a Korg MS10 (as a present, from my father). I could sit for hours with it, just patching sounds, everything from leads and basses to helicopters. Later on I also bought a TR808 drummachine so I could trigger the basslines and have drums at the same time, synced with CV. I won´t bore you with too much talk of all the gear I´ve had through the years, you have that on the gearlist page.

I´ve always listened to other peoples music, and I´ve always been fond of synthpop. Vince Clarke is one of the big synth-icons I have followed, I loved his melodies .My musical roots can be found in Kraftwerk , JM Jarre, New Order, Depeche Mode, Ultravox, OMD, Alphaville etc, the list can be made long. But I think it´s Kraftwerk that has influenced me the most, and the way I think about music when I make it.

The song "Electric poetry" is a kind of ovation to the music I grew up with, and KW in particular. In the beginning of my music careér I tried to replicate all of my favorite bands & artists. I didn´t really have my own sound, and the results of that were music without personality. You have to look inside yourself to see what´s important to you, & if it feels right then go with that feeling. It´s not until now that I have developed my own style to the music.

I make the music all the way by myself, from song making to mixing & mastering, cover layout, & homepage, etc.
The new CD "On the road to wisdom" is recorded and produced by me, but it´s mastered by Brian Hazard at the 11th mastering studio, and the cover is made by Greg Rolfes.

A Blue Ocean Dream, came out of a real dream, of building a house by the sea. That´s something I want for my family in the future. My fiancé Monica made me realize a lot of things about my thinking, and my attitude against music. I started to slow down the tempo, from 145bpm techno to 65bpm relaxing soundscapes. It was a drastic change, but far more interesting. Monica is the love of my life, and she supports me 100% in the abod project, and she gives me critics and feedback when I make the music.

I´m using software synthesizers now, but you can´t replace the feeling of the old analog synths, such as a Moog (wood panels). I´m slowly building up a new studio, bit by bit. But due to saving space, all the hardware equipment I have ever used has been replaced by a computer and the musicsoftwares. I call my studio "The Robot Studio"....

The2ndPart
This was my first attempt to make music , Together with my friend Seppo Bergman, no songs really, just ideas and lots of sound making on the Korg ms10, Sequential Circuits ProOne, TR808 and the DW6000. I recorded it all in realtime with some basslines and the drums running with cv (control voltage). This period was between 1983-1987. It´s kind of sad that I didn´t keep the recordings, they have vanished somehow when I moved from home. I remember that the sound was early Depeche and lots of JM Jarre stuff, not as good though !

Teknikk Bureau
I bought a Ensoniq ESQ1, a great digital/analog synt with a built in 8 track sequencer, and extra cartridges. It costed me a fortune at that time, but the sequencer was worth all the money. You could make patterns and then chain them together into songs. The only drawback were a bad filter section, and the fact that it only had 8 voices! but if you are into minimalistic synthpop that´s not a problem. A hole different world opened up, now I could make hole songs without ever using the taperecorder. Later on I traded the Ensoniq to the new SQ80 and a EPS 16+ sampler, I also bought a mixer and a cheap microphone. I made some tracks that I really thought were good, but when I listen to them now, I feel it´s too much of that times techno. But I made some tracks that had lots of Kraftwerk feel to them, one of them ended up on a compilation CD at eternity records called Circuit One. I was asked to participate on other synthpop compilations but I didn´t have the money, because you would have to pay to be on them. All this happened between 1988-1994

electrocowboy
From 1994 to 1997 the musicmaking was on ice, but then I got contacted by Ola Lindström, who helped me with the song for the compilation earlier. He was interested in making some music with me at that time, and we came up with the name electrocowboy. It was intended to be "not so serious", with a cowboy attitude, synthesizers and hats...can you imagine? what a laugh! But...! we made some really good songs, and one of them was "Down to Vegas", which Ola made a really good synth-hook-line on, and I wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes, I reworked it now to fit the ABOD sound, but when we made it it was a kind of disco feel to it.

Beta One
A lot of things happened that made my life turn upside down in 1997, but I started to make music again. I bought a Roland XP50 synth and started to make some tunes, and in 1998 I heard about mp3.com, and how you could upload your music to the internet. I made some, (what I thought was), great trance tracks, but they were just bad copies of all the other bad trance tracks that mp3.com were filled with. I got bored on this type of music, it just wasn´t my thing, so I took up the next project instead.

nuclear wasted
This was the beginning of tracing the sound of Kraftwerk. I did some real divi´n into how they made the songs, I´ve always been facinated by them, but I wanted to know how they got that "kraftwerk vibe" to their songs. I almost went fanatic about it, the song "human emotion" was identic to the intervals Kraftwerk used, yes I ckracked their code! Ok... so what do I do now? I needed to do something totally drastic, so I started to work with my own feelings, what did I feel when I made music, what were my goals with it?
A Blue Ocean Dream was born...!

COLLABORATION

I´ve been doing some remixes and helping other artists with their music, here is a list that hopefully will keep on growing.

Karlberg: Swedish artist with a very nice voice, I did a new version of his song "Kan du se mig". You can visit his site here: KarlbergStation

Martin Nicholson: English artist, making very good Jarre style music, I helped him to do a remix of the song "memories"

Hjörtur : a Danish electronic artist, I did a remix of his song "This Car", visit his site here: Hjörtur

Joe Ramey: From USA. He has started a collaboration project called Brand New Day. I did 2 different remix versions of his original song "Out of this world" visit his site at: BND