Forgotten Future is a moniker and personal project of San Francisco based European platinum-album electronic music composer Julius Dobos.
Known for his work in titles such as the DragonBall Z series, Don't Mess with the Zohan, MallCop, NCIS and others, he spent two decades in the television and film industries as a composer, synthesist, arranger, mixer, producer. Julius launched Forgotten Future in 2014 as an independent project that is free from current trends and is everything but usual.
Planned as a four-album series and released under the Creative Shop Music label, forgotten future is a musical and ideological framework of beliefs related to some the "big questions" of human existence. The series takes the listener on a cosmic psybient musical trip through themes such as time, space, life, origin, multiverses and white holes. After much anticipation and already getting rave reviews, the first forgotten future album, W1 is out now!
Describe your sound in one ramble-on sentence..
Forgotten future creates psybient - ambient - spacey electronic music that evokes deep emotions & memories with strong, haunting melodies, cutting-edge sound design, driving fragmented rhythms, intricate and sometimes epic instrumentation, processed field recordings and rich, evolving analog organic textures.
What inspires you to make music?
Dreams, thoughts about the Universe and existence, Nature, personal experiences, sweet sadness, love, the desire to find the truth and remember forever. A sound, a texture, a melody that just happens... those that immediately bring back feelings that are not tied to concrete events in the past, yet they feel so intensely familiar, personal. Also, creating and leaving behind something honest, that would simply not exist if I don't create it, something that reveals our ability and desire as humans to feel so deeply, which is the beauty of being a human, is also a major inspiration. Maybe one days others will hear it and envy us, earthlings.
What aspect of making music excites you the most right now?
I strive to make my listeners feel in ways that they haven't experienced it before, and in the process of sound design, composition and arrangement I also go through moods and experiences that I haven't known before. It's an amazing state of mind & soul that I wish I could share with everyone. Writing melodies and designing sounds that makes people go "what was THAT??? It made me feel so sad...". But what excites me the most these days is to create music that has literally dozens of almost hidden layers - each with some meaning or emotion attached to it. If you are still discovering new elements, cool little details after the seventeenth listen, I feel I was successful.
What are the biggest challenges you face as a musician?
While I definitely don't measure success by album sales, building its audience from scratch is an important but challenging task, because forgotten future is a brand new project with a unique concept and sound. My past electro-orchestral releases and film industry work attracted a large, but very different type of audience, so now I'm navigating new waters. It's exciting, though as I feel that finally, this is the trend-free, compromise-free honest music that I was initially inspired to make as a teenager – as opposed to catering safely to a given audience. So now again, regardless of the past successes, scores, platinum album, whatever, it's hard swimming against the tsunami of expectations, cliches and trends that every established scene has. We always advice artist to just be themselves. But sometimes the audience just isn't yet ready for that. One of the practical challenges of forgotten future is the live shows - the genre is still not big enough to attract investors and draw large crowds. But maybe that's a good thing.
What's one of your all-time favorite recordings?
Oh, man. Just one? Jean-Michel Jarre's Zoolook comes to mind right now.
Name three people who have influenced your music, and tell us why- Living or dead.
I'd have to start with my parents, who have always had a fine taste for electronic music and introduced me to such artists of the '70s and '80s like Vangelis, Jarre, Mike Oldfield, Brian Eno, John Carpenter, etc. when I was 5 (and they sent me to study piano at the same time). The second would be Vangelis, whose music opened up new emotional dimensions for me in my teenage years – proving that electronic music can be even more expressive than orchestral music, thank to his intricate performance, epic instrumentation and emotional sensitivity. His music made me cry when I was 13 and I respect his concepts and approach to music the same way today. Last but not least: my friend Vincent Villuis, who (along with Sandrine Gryson) founded Ultimae Records, releasing artists such as Aes Dana, Solar Fields, Carbon Based Lifeforms over the past 15 years. Their work definitely supported me in holding on to my convictions, that despite of the recent trends, great electronic music should be deeply emotional, and even if melodically minimalistic, sonically complex.
Do you have any recent or upcoming projects you'd like to share with us? Tell us about it.
Forgotten future is created to be a four-part concept work (W1-W4). The recently released first album (W1) establishes a framework and also offers food for thought about the question "what happens after life as we know it?" and "what is consciousness?" (W1 stands for the question "What?"). Right now I'm finishing up the work with the forgotten future online experience website, where visitors can discover the layers of each track of the album, encounter the philosophical and aesthetic links between the visual elements, sonic layers and emotional ingredients of the scenes, and also create their custom mixes of them! I have also started my research, conceptualization work and sonic experiments for the second album, forgotten future: W2, which will examine some interesting aspects of the second topic: Time (as W2 stands for "When?")
What is your ideal or target audience?
Everyone who enjoys taking a musical trip by attentively listening in headphones or in an intimate space, everyone who appreciates a unique sonic experience (and doesn't confuse psybient with new age relaxation music:) Basically, all lovers of psybient, ambient, chillout, psychill, downtempo, and space music.
Do you write/compose your own songs? Briefly describe your songwriting process..
I love completely getting my thoughts and feelings lost in the theme. With forgotten future, I spend time trying to understand the point of view of science, religion, philosophy about the subject, then collect and make sense out of the thoughts and ideas that I have about it (usually closer to metaphysics than to rigid sciences) – then mix all this with my own emotions about the topic. Of course, the emphasis is on the feelings, rather on reasoning. Sometimes it's the sounds that I generate or field recordings that I process that inspire the melodies, harmonies or patterns, but sometimes the textures are just an extended dimension of the melody-driven composition. Whether I'm working in Studio CS or on my sketching setup at home, the process involves a good amount of sonic experimentation, synth- and effects work. Counter- and micro-melodies form while I perform every part. The structure develops, followed by extensive midi automation and mixing to reproduce the feel that I want to express.
What do you like the most about Radio Airplay?
Learning about your audience and their exact musical preferences, both among your own tracks and other representative artists' is an extremely powerful tool. You don't have to go through an expensive agency to access all this valuable information is something I wish I had had 15 years ago... it's quite neat that anyone can do this for a minimal investment today with Radio Airplay.
Interesting story about you, or anything extra you'd like to add.
I have some crazy stories from my scoring days... but let me share a recent one instead. I had known ambient pioneer, Robert Rich, for a few years, but we never met up aside from some music competition panelist work. After searching the world twice over for a mastering engineer who truly understands the intricate details of the sonic layers and the specific feel I was going for, I found out that Robert was that person – and that we live 12 minutes from each other! Mind you, our interconnected genres are a tiny niche in the electronic music landscape... but, it's a small planet, indeed.Before the official forgotten future videos come out, here is a behind-the-scenes video:
Forgotten Future: W1 digital album, CD, 24-bit studio master: https://forgottenfuture.bandcamp.com/
Forgotten Future on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/forgotten-future-w1/id986270591
Forgotten Future online experience: http://www.forgottenfuturemusic.com
Julius Dobos | Forgotten Future on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/juliusdobos
Julius Dobos official website: http://www.juliusdobos.com