Johan Kotlinski, the spider in the web of the Scandinavian chip
music scene, was born 1979 in Sweden on an island in the Baltic Sea.
His first introduction to computers was when his dad brought home a
Commodore 64 in the mid eighties. As many others, he developed a deep
interest in music during the teenage years. He learned to play the
piano and also started using an Amiga to compose own tracks, which at
the time (about 1992) was state of the art technology for hobbyists.

In 1996, Johan took the name Role Model and started to make his own
electronic music on the Amiga, which was released on demo tapes. The
music had a very raw and unpolished sound, compared to contemporary
electronic music, and had a hard time getting much acceptance from the
house and techno scene at that time. But there was still much positive
feedback from friends and strangers.

In 2000, Johan started to develop Little Sound Dj (LSDj), a music
editor for the Game Boy. The goal was to create a tool for making
music during long subway commutes.
When LSDj v1.0 was finished in end of 2000, he started to sell it on
home-made cartridges. Many hundred cartridges were sold over the
coming years, that were used by artists such as Puss, Nullsleep,
Covox, and even Beck... but most importantly it helped giving chip
music a revival, building a new scene with artists and people loving
music built with basic analog waveforms.

Musically, Role Model's breakthrough started when he started to upload
tracks on the site micromusic.net around 2000, which soon reached a
global audience. Attention followed and soon Role Model started to get
live gigs all over Europe. Eventually the music was acclaimed by the
likes of Malcolm McLaren, Sven Väth and  Kraftwerk, and one Role Model
track was even featured on Cocoon Compilation D. It gave me
inspiration to make more music, and also made me go further with my
record label Bleep Street. A string of 7" records were released,
including best seller "Papaya EP" by Goto80. Later, Rebel Pet Set was
launched, a record label explicitly focused on releasing chip music
style. So far records by Covox and Goto80 have been issued on Rebel
Pet Set.

In 2004, Johan was involved with started the monthy club Microdisko in
Stockholm, which has been an important stage for the best chip music
artists over the world, and a great thing to make Stockholm a better
place :)  http://www.microdisko.net