Biography / Trivia

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, Jesper (pronounced "yes-per") is one of today's most popular Western game music composers, as well an occasional film composer. Through the years, he perfected a style of his own, mixing loop-based, DJ-ish and ambient electronics with orchestral and choir elements. This can be heard in the majority of his recent projects, including the popular Hitman series. The symphonic elements came at a later stage, while the electronic side was forged first by being a demo scene musician for several years.

Kyd first started by composing for the Commodore 64, for a period starting from 1985 to 1988, with a highlight of having done the music for some Zargon demos in 87. In 1988, he switched to the Amiga, first working under The Starlight Project (Kefrens) until he joined the Danish division of the Swedish group Silents, along with his friend Mikael Balle in 1989. They formed the duo Kyd/Balle Productions, him taking care of the music and Balle doing the programming of the demos. They participated to several Scandinavian demo parties, inlcuding one of the biggest in history (2000+ visitors): "THE PARTY 2". During his demo scene days, he did his first video game composition for "U.S.S. John Young". Jesper quit the demo scene in 1993, after the fusion between Silents and Crionics to form the game developer Zyrinx, having done over 50 Amiga demo tunes in total.

The first game released by Zyrinx was "Sub-Terrania" (1993). This Sega Genesis game featured Kyd's first "big work"; a richly textured FM soundtrack that emanated with the still fresh demo scene flavor. He composed a couple of other Genesis soundtracks, keeping a mostly similar style. When the Sega Saturn hit the market, Zyrinx/Scavenger developed Amox and Scorcher, and then was possible for the music to be in a streamable format (Redbook). This company went down shortly after, in 1998, and this was when Jesper built Nano Studios in New York and established Jesper Kyd Productions. But this was not the end of the collaboration between Jesper and the rest of the team, as most of them started the company IO Interactive, developer of the Hitman series. For the first game, "Hitman: Codename 47", the soundtrack was completely electronic, but starting with the second in the series, "Silent Assassin", Jesper added an orchestral side to the music, which was performed by the 110-pieces Budapest Symphony Orchestra and the Hungarian Radio Choir. All games developed by IO Interactive so far have been scored by Jesper. He also contributed music for other game companies for projects such as "The Nations", "Brute Force", "Robotech: Invasion" and scored the cinematics of "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory". Jesper is also credited for the music in Epic Games' Unreal Engine Demo 3.

As mentioned, Kyd also compose music for film and TV. The projects he worked on so far are:

• Impulse
• Stranger
• Night All Day
• Death of a Saleswoman
• PURE
• Day Pass
• Cycle
• Paper plane Man
• Going with Neill
• The Lion Tamer
• Organizm
• Play
• Gameplanet Spots
• Elevatoren

Now established in Los Angeles, CA, he continues to write both game and film music.

Albums (11)