Johannes Bjerregaard

Danish game composer with his own driver — in 1986 the only "scene composer with own player" SIDwave can name — who "made commercial music for games, with his own company: Danish Music Company", handle Jozz/Upfront (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).

Facts#

• Corresponded with charles-deenen in summer 1988 (having scored games for a year and a half) and in October 1988 became the first non-founding member of maniacs-of-noise; Deenen sent him "a disk with Turbo Ass, his music driver, and some 4-bit samples, but Bjerregaard preferred his own driver"; credits include Stormlord (1989, with Tel) and Flimbo's Quest (1990, with Reyn Ouwehand) (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).
• Two of his tunes, James Bond 3 and Myth, are in the GitHub collection of recovered players under Bjerregaard_Johannes_MON (source: s-realdmx-sid-players).
• In JCH's memoir: one of the two other Danes with an own player in 1987; "by far the best C64 composer" in JCH's triangle of peers; while visiting JCH he "discovered how to use a test bit in the SID chip to reset the random numbers used internally by the noise waveform" — noise "more predictable … slightly more metallic" (ring-modulation-and-sync; a draft magazine article about it survives in JCH's scans); his player stuck at 13 rasterlines against a 12-line goal ("Well - I guess there are limits to everything"); his advice to JCH: "Don't make music for private people, it usually goes nowhere" (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes).

The sources (2026-08-30)#

The two files are his own Turbo Assembler sources, and the James Bond 3 header is a MoN commission: ;RECEIVED : 18/6, ;LATEST DELIVERY : 19/6, ;SPECIFICATIONS : 30 SECS OF JAMES BOND TITLE TUNE INCLUDING A DEMO OF THE MANIACS OF NOISE MUSIC STYLE; instrument 9 is named JEROEN PLOINK, and a commented BASIC stub decodes to "STORM LORD MUSIC (C)MON." (a reading of the bytes) — the demo screen says "Player and music by Jozz Bjerregaard". The player is his (nothing shared with musicfile), with a software second-sustain level, two hard-restart schemes and a rastertime meter in Myth; cheat sheet on bjerregaard-player (source: s-realdmx-bjerregaard-player).

• His Myth Demo is on laxity's 2007 list of the best SIDs ever (source: s-sidin11-laxity-interview).

Credited by the founders#

• Deenen told C=Lehti in 1989 that the inspiration for the MoN music routine came from "his good friend Johannes Bjerregaard" (source: s-c-lehti-maniacs-of-noise).
• Tel kept naming him: "From the latest generation I liked the funky stuff Johannes Bjerregaard produced" (1994), and fourth in his 1996 all-time composer list (sources: s-domination01-jeroen-tel-interview, s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview).

Related#

maniacs-of-noise · charles-deenen · laxity · sid-player-routine

Sources#

s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise · s-realdmx-sid-players · s-realdmx-bjerregaard-player · s-sidin11-laxity-interview · s-c-lehti-maniacs-of-noise · s-domination01-jeroen-tel-interview · s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles · s-chordian-player-editor-notes