Markus Castrén

Markus Castrén is a composer who was employed as a trainee at Nokia during 2002. Along with Jussi Salonen, he worked on ringtones for the Nokia N-Gage and other phones using the Mango soundbank, such as the Nokia 3300 and 7600. He also composed a handful of monophonic ringtones. After both him and Salonen left, three composers joined very shortly afterwards: Aleksi Eeben, Hannu af Ursin and Henry Daw. Upon joining Nokia, he replaced Timo Anttila, who was employed for a year and was a friend from school.

Outside of Nokia, he was a demoscene musician known as Slice, Mark 1 and later Ganja and was part of the Amiga demo group Nerve Axis. Following his employment at Nokia he continued his studies at school, then became a DVD author. He also composed music for a handful of local Finnish commercials as well as sending demos to record labels, and has not been active in the field of music since the late 2000s. His last public track was "Here With Me", which was composed for a video his friends were working on.

Work at Nokia
Castrén joined Nokia as a part-time trainee sound designer in May 2002. He easily got the job due to his past experience writing tracker modules, featuring 4-to-16 poly limits like Nokia's ringtones at the time. He was initially tasked to write a set of monophonic ringtones, two of which shipped on the Nokia 2100, as well as some ringtones using the small bank. Later he was tasked with Jussi Salonen to compose electronic/dance ringtones for experimental phones such as the N-Gage and 7600, although many of them continued to be used years later. For the former device, he wrote a set of 80s arcade-inspired ringtones and alerts, though only one of them made the cut. He also made two polyphonic remixes of monophonic ringtones, including the iconic Kick ringtone.

Despite being asked to stay, he left in October that year as he wanted to continue his studies. Two of his friends immediately joined after he left: Aleksi Eeben, whom he knew from his demoscene years, and Hannu af Ursin, a fellow musician who was also at the Tampere Polytechnic Art and Media school.

Castrén rarely heard his ringtones in public, due to most of them being exclusive to experimental and fashion models. In 2022, researcher fusoxide interviewed him about his Nokia work; he expressed amazement over the fact that people still enjoy and remember his ringtones over 20 years later.

Credits
See Markus Castrén/Credits