Staff Members :: Simon Elchlepp

Biography

I know, it's a terrible, terrible cliché, but it all started with Final Fantasy VII, namely a) my enthusiasm for video games that take somewhere between 40 and 60 hours to tell their long-winded stories, and b) my interest in video game music. Not that I hadn't been exposed to such music before: I've spent more than enough time during my youth (read: before my uni studies) on playing video games, but with Final Fantasy VII I discovered that I could buy the game's soundtrack from some import dealer in Germany. Sure enough, I simply had to get this magically exotic item — instead, through some mix up, I got the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack, which turned out not to be too bad either.

Some months later, I stumbled upon Yasunori Mitsuda's soundtrack for Chrono Cross, and from that point onwards, I was sold — not only on video game music, but on music itself. While I had a small collection of CDs before I indulged into this new hobby of mine, I now started to expand my tastes and listen to music much more attentively than before (those Wagner pieces in John Boorman's Excalibur probably also helped).

Fast forward more than ten years, and I'm still not sure how to get my collection of CDs from Germany to Australia (where I moved in 2008), so I'll have to continue to clog up my computer's hard drive with my constantly expanding collection of music files, which now spans video game soundtracks, the ubiquitous John Williams, Norwegian post-black metal, Japanese free jazz (you never know what you'll find in you second hand music shop's bargain bin) and lots of stuff in between, with some Enya and Phil Collins discs thrown in for good(?) measure.

Another cliché is probably that all rabid music fans dream of being music critics one day. I'm very happy that I got the chance to indulge in two passions of mine — writing and listening to music — at the same time through reviewing music for SEMO. I'd be very grateful for any kind of constructive feedback — so bring on the criticism, let me now how my reviews could be improved, and shoot me an email!

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