Welcome, Monomer!

Posted on April 3rd, 2013

We are pleased to welcome Gavin Allen aka Monomer to our family! With the release of his debut EP "Trials" (Pause Music) one year ago, he clearly declared himself as an impressive composer, with all his progressive expression and passion.

Gavin was raised in Wayland, Massachusetts, a suburb outside of Boston, and has been a musician since joining the elementary school orchestra in third grade. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 2009 and worked a couple jobs in game audio as a Sound Designer/Composer before settling into his current gig as Producer at an iOS development studio.

Gavin started playing music with the upright bass in elementary school. However, he was listening to NES and Amiga sounds long before he paid attention to any other form of music, mainly watching his brother playing Castlevania.

Gavin first dabbled in chiptunes when some of his brother's friends were working on a retro 4-player simple fighting game for XBLA. Using VSTs for the chip sounds and sequenced in various DAWs, he limited himself to the 4 basic channels of the DMG chip (2 pulse, wave channel, and noise). Those early tracks turned into the "Ranger Wars" soundtrack.

"I really appreciate the value of composing within limitations (which is why I gravitated towards chiptunes), and starting out that way really helped my melodic writing and gave me a creative spark, but I quickly saw a ton of potential to combine chip sounds with other acoustic and electronic instruments for some really interesting sound palettes, and I've been pursuing that ever since. My songs usually end up being much more complex than just the 4 channels of the DMG chip, but I still try to limit the number of different instruments I end up using on a project and keep that same focus on melodic writing that my first chip tracks had."

— Monomer

During his career, Gavin was responsible for scoring of "Power Gig" (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) and sound design for "Oregon Trail" (Wii), as well as appearances in albums like "Preschtale Variations", Rokko Chan remix album and others.

You can find Monomer's works at his Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and also follow him via Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile, stay tuned to Ubiktune for updates. We have something to share with you very soon...