Recluse

Producers Thomas Nökling and Espen Gulbrandsen come together for the Recluse project.

Thomas Nökling

Thomas Nökling aka. Manipura, born in 1981 in the town of Bergen in Norway - began with music already at the age of 8 when he started to take piano lessons. Combined with his interest in computers, he soon started experimenting with tracker software and started producing trance at an age of 16, highly influenced by Ferry Corsten and Tiesto. Later he traded in trackers for midi sequencers and hardware.

From there on, his musical taste has grown more progressive but still you can find him behind trance aliases such as Recluse and 34th Assembly, though trance is not his favoured genre these days. Thomas's music styles vary greatly from alias to alias, but as Manipura he's producing mostly melodic breaks with harmonic and balearic melodies.

His first Manipura tune, 'Halcyon Days' was released by Minimal Records in 2004, and immediately sailed up as one of Sasha's favourites during the summer. Since then, Thomas have upcoming releases on labels such as 3Beat, Loöq, Minimal, Deepblue, Furry Music, CP Recordings and Heavy Rotation. Together with Stian Klo from Furry Nipples, he's Seyton. The two of them just got the track 'The Drake Equation' featured on Global Underground 028.

Thomas's productions are supported by a wide range of dj's. Among them are Sasha, Paul Oakenfold, Shiloh, Pete Tong, Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, Hernan Cattaneo, Paul Van Dyk and the list goes on...

Espen Gulbrandsen

Espen Gulbrandsen started out playing various instruments at an early age. First he played the clarinet in the local school’s marching band. Then he took piano lessons for a brief time. Then it was the guitar. Then it was the piano again at 12. His goal was to start a band, but there was an essential piece missing: someone to play with. His dreams were almost completely shattered because there was absolutely no one in the area who shared his desire for playing music. It was a discouraging realisation which put a break on further developments.

By chance he was introduced to a very basic sequencer application that worked under MS DOS on the PC. This had an enormous effect on the 13year-old youngster. Consequently, time and effort paid off and more sophisticated tools were soon obtained.

Then he met with Thomas Nøkling, which was to take things one step further: a few years after the mp3.com success, ‘Recluse’ was established as a collaboration project between Thomas and Espen. Starting out with a remix of Critical7 – Lost, which got picked up by Lost Language, there was certainly more to come.

Three years later, there was a turning point as Espen released all his current music through the website mp3.com under the guise ‘Fantasy’. which turned out to be a success both financially as well as in terms of building up a network of talented musicians from across the world. Among other things he was asked to remix for the Easter West division of Warner France.

Through 2003, three singles were written: ‘Yellow Moon’, ‘Isle Dauphine’, and finally ‘Emotional Void’. All three saw support from Armin van Buuren, ‘Isle Dauphine’ from both Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk. Through Thomas Espen was fortunate to become acquainted with Stian Klo, and Lars Jacobsen. Subsequently, there were collaborations going on between the whole ‘incestuous’ bunch. Working with Lars (Elusive) reflects some of their mutual love for melodic balaeric progressive house, meanwhile working with Stian (Likwit) can be described as a collaboration focusing more on driving, progressive rhythm.