Daniel Rosenfeld - Minecraft Music

Daniel Rosenfeld (born May 9, 1989) is a German musician, producer and sound engineer best known as the composer and sound designer for the video game Minecraft. His music is generally published under the name C418 (pronounced "see-four-eighteen").

Early life

Rosenfeld, son of a Soviet gold smith and a German mother, was born and grew up in East Germany after reunification, and the economic realities of the region limited his resources to learn audio composition. He says he learned on early versions of Schism Tracker and Ableton Live in the early 2000s, which were both rudimentary tools at the time.

Music for Mojang

Learning under such restrictions turned out to help the young composer when he began collaborating with Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson. The sound engine in the game was not very powerful whatsoever. So Rosenfeld had to be creative in his approach to sound effects and music.

As a freelance artist, Rosenfeld was not on staff at Mojang, the game company behind Minecraft, which was sold to Microsoft in 2014. Rosenfeld says he still owns the rights to all the music in the game, having released two albums featuring songs from the soundtrack. The first soundtrack, Minecraft â€" Volume Alpha, was released on March 4, 2011. The video game blog Kotaku selected the music of Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On November 9, 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft - Volume Beta, which includes the music that was added in later versions of the game. Minecraft - Volume Alpha found its first release in physical format on Ghostly International in 2015.

Persson and Rosenfeld worked together again after Minecraft's success in the creation of a new game titled 0x10c, but the game was never released, with Persson halting production in August 2013. Rosenfeld released an album featuring his work on the project in September 2014. The album was released digitally with little publicity; Rosenfeld simply sent out a tweet stating that it was available.

Independent work

In addition to game soundtracks, Rosenfeld composes his own independent music. He has released a large amount of music on his Bandcamp page, but of which he has only officially released four LPs other than the Minecraft soundtracks: 72 Minutes Of Fame (along with "I forgot something, didn't I") in 2011, Seven Years Of Server Data in 2011, One in 2012, 148 in 2015, and most recently 2 years of failure in 2016. He says he does not seek fame and he struggles with public attention, such as critical comments from his large group of followers on Twitter. The Guardian has compared his compositions to those of Brian Eno and Erik Satie because of their ambient quality.

Discography

Albums

EPs

Miscellaneous

References

External links

• Official website
• C418 on Bandcamp