Early Signals
I grew up drawn to sounds that felt slightly distant, synthetic, or damaged in the best
possible way. Synthesizers caught me early. So did 8-bit NES music and the strange
emotional pull of electronic sound when it felt bigger than the machine making it.
One of my first obsessions was a Scooter cassette. Later, spending endless hours with MTV
changed the shape of my musical taste. It taught me that sound, image, mood, and identity
could all merge into one atmosphere. Hearing Linkin Park for the first time was a real
turning point. It pulled me into alternative rock and into the idea that electronic
textures and emotional weight could live inside the same song.
In the early 2000s, I used to imagine creating a band that played what I called
nintendocore. I came up with that word on my own and had no idea anything like it already
existed. Later I heard HORSE the band and realized that the genre was real. That stayed
with me for years, not because I wanted to copy it, but because it made me want to build
something at the intersection of that energy and other genres, something more melancholy,
intimate, and personal.
The Records That Stayed With Me
Some albums stayed with me not because I wanted to imitate them, but because they proved
how much feeling atmosphere can carry.
The Cure — Disintegration
For atmosphere, emotional scale, and the feeling that texture can be just as important
as melody.
ivri — the theory of you
For the way retro-digital sound can feel intimate, contemporary, and emotionally
precise at the same time.
Linkin Park — Reanimation
For its fearless genre blending and the feeling that electronic experimentation can
still hit with human force.
Why softreboot Exists
For years I carried a very specific inner world without a real way to build it on my own.
I knew the emotional temperature I was chasing: memory decay, digital loneliness, damaged
textures, and the feeling of two people sharing the same room while living in different
internal realities.
The years kept moving, but actually making music still felt far away. Then, in 2026, I
heard ivri and realized I was listening to something very close to what I had been
imagining for years. That gave me a huge impulse to make something of my own.
softreboot began when it finally became possible to build that world more independently. I
did not come to AI because the human side of music mattered less to me. I came to it
because it opened a door. It gave me a way to shape songs, atmosphere, and release worlds
with a freedom I had wanted for a long time.
What I Am Trying to Make
I am interested in songs that feel like artifacts: something lived-in, slightly worn,
still glowing. Technology in softreboot is not there as a gimmick. It is part of the
emotional environment itself, because that is how modern life feels to me. We live through
screens, static, saved fragments, playback, and loss.
Even though the production process eventually pulled me toward other genres too, that core
impulse is still there. The idea of something nintendocore-adjacent, but more melancholy
and personal, still feels like a private north star to me. The sound of ivri remains a
benchmark: not as a template to copy, but as proof that the kind of emotional,
retro-digital world I had imagined could really exist.
That is where the project comes from. Not from nostalgia alone, and not from technology
alone, but from the point where memory, atmosphere, and human presence keep bleeding into
one another.