Interview with Anders Dahlgren, Founder, Radio Rivendell

Radio Rivendell is the first all-fantasy internet radio station, and has recently gained a few fans among the Suvudu.com team. We’re always eager to share the things we love with our readers, and Radio Rivendell is right at the top of the list. If you’re looking for good background music for gaming, writing or reading fantasy, you should bookmark Radio Rivendell. Here’s an interview with Anders Dahlgren, founder:

Tell me a little bit about yourself, and why you started Radio Rivendell.

Yes, my name is Anders Dahlgren and actually quite the normal casual RPG and gaming nerd from Sweden. I’ve always loved gaming and fantasy in particular and have been playing roleplaying games now and then for the last 28 years now, yikes! Radio Rivendell emerged from the need to add a musical element to our gaming sessions, we started out playing music we found on the web and then movie soundtracks to enrich our sessions. As we quickly got bored with our CDs I started a simple Shoutcast radio station on a crappy extra computer I had in a wardrobe, just to see how it all worked. Though as the station became public it sort of caught on and after a month or so it was so popular (oh well, only six people could listen ) so that we couldn’t get in and listen to it ourselves. That’s when I found out that it was a project and music genre I would be able to dig a little deeper into. Two years later I bought the domain name and the site started to grow from that. And that’s over ten years down the road!

What kind of music do you play? How do you choose it?

We used to play everything we could get our hands on on Rivendell, soundtracks for games, movies and TV, though American lawyers eventually found us out and started to write emails. Though we are located in a different country I didn’t want things to go south so we quickly moved towards the composers scene and unsigned artists instead. Which actually is so much more fun! You can listen to John Williams, Howard Shore and the other big guys on your favorite streaming service or your CDs, so that’s actually something that has worked for our benefit. Though we’ve also gotten in contact with smaller record companies, and actually also gotten the playing rights from guys such as Inon Zur, Jesper Kyd and others. Today the music comes to me in the mail or in email directly from the composers or agents. As we mainly play instrumental tracks from the fantasy-sounding genre I screen all tracks myself. A task which is quite fun, but takes some time. The music must be able to fit for many purposes, we have quite a lot of listener who listen on Radio Rivendell when they play games, paint, write, study or work, so we try to keep the vocal tracks down as these might disrupt your flow.

Who do you see as your audience?

Our listeners are almost any kind of person, but mainly those who are into the fantasy field in one way or other. Typically it’s the stressed out office employee wanting to get some focus or relaxation at work, the writer who needs audible inspiration for the book or the poem, or the gamer who’s got fed up with the music in Lord of the Rings Online, just to mention a few. So I believe we have quite a broad span, but it all centers around the fantasy theme.

What are some of your favorite tracks?

As our music library is ever growing I jump between favorite tracks myself, and I’m drawn to both the powerful and heavy soundtrack themes such as Courage of Nations by Gothic Storm Music but I’m also really in love with Ari Pulkinnen’s theme to Trine 2 which really, in my eyes/ears, capture the joyful fantasy feeling quite well. Then we have our own bunch of composers (Sean Beeson, Pontus Rufelt, etc.) hanging around the site that I try to follow closely as they are all able to produce really marvelous things.