Elwood

Jussi-Matti Salmela (born August 11, 1979), better known as his popular artist name Elwood or simply Jussi Salmela, is a famous is a demoscene DJ musician from Kankaanpää, Finland.^[1] His alternative alias is known as Elwood79 and "ELW" which he used during his releases at the previous site of MP3.com. Today, Elwood's work is popular for remixes and parodies called "Deadlock YTPMVs", showing a multitude of images and sounds matching together and forming nice rhythm and beat music in the fashion of Dead Lock.

Music

Elwood released 15 module compositions throughout the 1990s written in FastTracker 2, some of which have been featured in home-made levels for video games such as Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Unreal Tournament, Mario Forever and Cyberruner. They can be fetched at different sites, but primarily at the Mod Archive. Most of them have received top rates by reviewers there, calculating an artist average of at least 9 out of 10 points.

By the end of the 1990s he stopped releasing for the tracking scene and moved to MIDI software, producing a number of tracks similar to his old style, though having a more "mainstream" flavor to them. Many of the MP3 tracks from the newer timeline were released at the previous site of MP3.com. Last tracks from that era that he has been known to released are Low Horizon and Waverider Remix 2003 from the mentioned year. Past & Present was composed for Razor 1911, a warez and demogroup from Norway.

During late 2003 and early 2004 he organized the band LooM, which in spite of all the announcements hasn't yet released any completed material. Demo clips show that LooM music is very different from the style of Elwood's solo works, this time as a fusion with rock elements. According to the previous contact info on the LooM project, Elwood now lives in the bigger Finnish city of Pori, attending a school to prepare a possible education in media, while his cooperative partner Juuso Kemi (student buddy from his old high school) lives in Tampere. Juuso Kemi is featured as one of the producers behind the short-movie Teräskolikkoarkku, where he also made an actor appearance. Their album Electricities is apparently still under its way, since the site was updated again in 2006, standing still for almost two years long. It has never been heard of the group again.

On September 16, 2010, he released his first commercial music entry under the alias Magellanic Milk. The track represents a continuation on the melodic expedition started by Elwood, building from the demoscene and contemporary sounds and styles, with excellent good critics.

Recognition

Elwood's music has received high reviews throughout the demoscene websites, such as ModArchive, MODPlug Central, United Trackers and several other ones which had been active in the 90's but are now offline, such as Trax In Space and homemusic.cc. His music is regularly remixed and brought up in the demoscene. Elwood isn't like any popular DJ but he manage to get some popularity.

Remixes And Parodies

Due to his good song, Elwood's songs are the subject of numerous parodies, most of the time being Youtube Poop Musical Videos (for short: YTPMVs) since the year of 2010, Deadlock being the most used in remixes, with the names of the parodies ends with the suffixes "Dead" or "lock". Sick on Mondays is the second most used parody, with One Fine Day in third.

STBlackST

A Gmodder Machinima Youtuber named STBlackST made a video named Soldier's Magnificent Adventure, a Gmod/SFM video showing random characters from Team Fortress 2 having some weird adventures and stories, it's a funny serie that brought STBlackST propel into fame and the Gmod/SFM Community. The video is notorious for his sense of humour and complete total randomness but also for one particuliar thing: in the video, at 4:15 there is the character from Team Fortress Universe named (BLU) Spy, who "hump dances" in a dispenser (a machine that gives ammo supplies and heal your allies), behind him there is a blue control point and the background is simply an artwork of a deep space with beautiful stars. The music that is played in the moment is Deadlock, Elwood's 2nd oldest song since 1995. The video has a total of 2 600 000+ views since May 30th, 2016. Considered the STBlackST's best video at that moment of the year and one of his best videos of all time!

On the other side, this made Elwood a huge amount of popularity: since Soldier's Magnificent Adventure, many people in the comment started to talk about Deadlock, the song most loved by anyone in the video. And many other videos about Deadlock (being uploaded years before Soldier's Magnificent Adventure!) gained popularity. For example, this had over 10K of views and 4-5 comments until Soldier's Magnificent Adventure came, it increase to 45K views and over 90+ comments talking about STBlackST's video! Still not convinced? This video too has gained popularity, being older than STBlackST's video (being over 5 years older!), it was 20K views and 20 comments and less. Then came the video, gained to 80K views and over 170 comments in less than a month! Fans of STBlackST invaded other videos related about Deadlock and started to talk about STBlackST's Gmod/SFM video a lot. Another fan made this video, in honor of the glorious scene, with 30K views and 150+ comments.

Personal Life

Elwood is not a public person and there is very little information on his personal life, the only sources being the bio section on his old homepage Elwood's World Of Music, which is now offline, and scarce comments in module files themselves. Rumors also said he is a shy person.

Bio from "Elwood's World of Music": Here is a brief introduction to me and my past: I was born 11 August 1979. I grew and grew and got interested in making music by chance when my friend had bought Amiga 500 (wow!). I hadn't ever even thought that you could do music with computer! In addition to that, I heard Jan Hammer's song, Crockett's theme, for the first time in my life. I was totally awestruck and I got a tremendous inspiration: I wanted to make music too! I made my first mod when I was about 12 years old or so. Of course it sounded total crap, but to me it was a good start I had an ordinary Amiga 500 (!) running soundtracker (I can't remember the version). Then time went by and I got better and better. PC became a must because its soundcards and programs were able to play 16 channels simultaneously. Then came FT2, which became a milestone in my "career". At the moment, I am concentrating mosly on MIDI stuff. I still use FT2 also. It's great for creating breakbeats and all kinds of other loops. I get a lot of inspirations from my environment, simple daily events, other musicians and very much from my wonderful girlfriend.

Discography

XM releases

MP3 releases

Agony
Beyond The Rainbow
Far Away
I Can Seek
Memorize
Stompin' Little Scouts
Sunshine
Take Me There
Waverider
Feed Your Supermind
On The Run
Outcast
Past & Present
Waverider 2003 remix (2003)
Low Horizon (2003)
Theme To Vertebra (2010)
Hey Peaches (You Leave Me Speechless) (2010)
Spark (2013)
The Guild of Rewind (2016)

Remixes/Parodies/YTPMVs

Remixes

Deadlock, remix made by asahala but actually it's more of a (unreleased) remake accorded to the description: "This is actually a remake of an unreleased remake I made in 2012 with Reason 4.0. The plan was to release this to celebrate Deadlock's 20th anniversary, but I decided to rewrite the whole song from scratch in FL11 (except for the main lead which was made with Thor)." It was made in Paokala style, some style of a demoscene. Deadlock (Paokala Remix) is one of the most popular remixes and has been introduced in an album music named The Sound of SceneSat Volume 1, alongside a remix of Fall From Sky.

Deadlock or "8-Bitlock" and "NESlock" from some fans, made by robokabuto. It's in the style of old Nintendo Entertainment System (a.k.a. NES as it's popular name), like olf video games such as Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. Paokala's remix is quite notorious and well loved from many, he decided to make another remix of Elwood's song: One Fine Day. robotkabuto is quite mysterious and not much known about them.

Deadlock: NES Remake, made by notube4life. As many expected to be a copy of rokokabuto's, notube4life defeated all the odds by making his own remake. As you can notice, the remake is actually a bit slower than the original: "Another remake of a classic mod, my sound engine passed the test (eventually...). Unfortunately it's a bit slower than the original, it's hard to get the BPM right on the NES. :-)". You can speed up to 1.25X the video so the BPM will be adjusted back to normal. Many thinks rokokabuto was before notube4life but it's clearly notube being 1 year more older than roko's version: notube's version is 9 years old while roko's is 8 years old.

The sound of notube's remake is the same as the original but in 8-Bit style, which is different from rokokabuto's version: roko made his own remake by using new sounds.

One Fine Day, made by Paokala, again. Paokala's remix of Deadlock is quite notorious and well loved from many, he decided to make another remix of Elwood's song. As the name hence, it's more of a remake than a remix. Since the popular remix, Paokala made a remix for One Fine Day.

"I heard this song for the first time just a few weeks ago and couldn't resist making a remake of it. As with the Deadlock remake, I tried to be as faithful to the original as possible. However, I had to adjust the tempo a bit, because the original was written in 04/138, which would have left nasty decimals to the bpm."

Fall From Sky, remix made by Firefox and K Line, featuring Romeo Knight. Those 3 DJs made this remix in celebration for Elwood's first XM ever. This remix is longer than the original song: Elwood's is 3 minutes long, the remix being 4:10. The remix has new sounds and instruments such as electric guitar. This remix appears in the list of the album The Sound of SceneSat Volume 1.

Trivia

Accorded to him, Elwood made his first mod at 12 years old, which it was in 1991 at the time.

His very first nickname artist was "Elwood79". The "79" comes from the year Jussi was born: 1979.
- Elwood is also known as Magellanic Milk, since September 2010. He made an album with one single song. It was the only time he used this name. Or was it?...
- Another one of his first artist names was "ELW", as a retracted nickname of Elwood.
He has demoscene DJ friends named Rage and Raven. They aren't very mentioned.
He has produced the soundtrack to a popular short-movie called Teräskolikkoarkku. Jussi even make a major role for the movie as a character.
Elwood claimed once he love the 1990s', 1995 being his favorite due to the start of his career but mostly the fact of he loves so much the songs in the 1990's.
As mentionned earlier, Jussi has a girlfriend, she apparently help him for musical inspirations. It is unknown if they are still together in their relationship.
Since STBlackST's Soldier's Magnificent Adventure, many of STBlackST's fans wish Elwood would the video since Deadlock is being used as a in the Gmod/SFM video.
You can purchase his songs right here!!!