Dorian Concept (born Oliver Thomas Johnson, 1984) is an Austrian composer, music producer and keyboardist whose work draws on an eclectic variety of sources including
modal and
free jazz
Free jazz is an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes. Musicians during ...
,
funk
Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the m ...
,
hip-hop,
electronic
Electronic may refer to:
*Electronics, the science of how to control electric energy in semiconductor
* ''Electronics'' (magazine), a defunct American trade journal
*Electronic storage, the storage of data using an electronic device
*Electronic co ...
, ambient, and soundscape music. Johnson adopted his stage name as a teenager as a reference to the
Dorian scale.
Dorian Concept is also a member of the Austrian funk band Jacob's Salty and Bamboozling Ladder (JSBL). He also has periodically toured as a keyboardist for
Flying Lotus
Steven Ellison (born October 7, 1983), known by his stage name Flying Lotus or sometimes FlyLo, is an American record producer, Disc jockey, DJ, filmmaker and rapper from Los Angeles. He is also the founder of the record label Brainfeeder.
Flyi ...
(along with Richard Spaven on drums) and collaborated with the
Cinematic Orchestra.
Biography
Born in
Vienna
en, Viennese
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, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
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, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
, Johnson studied multimedia art with a focus on acoustic engineering and graphics at the University of Applied Sciences in
Salzburg
Salzburg (, ; literally "Salt-Castle"; bar, Soizbuag, label=Bavarian language, Austro-Bavarian) is the List of cities and towns in Austria, fourth-largest city in Austria. In 2020, it had a population of 156,872.
The town is on the site of the ...
from 2005 to 2009. During this period, he won Elektronikland Salzburg prizes for composition in electronic music in 2005 and 2007 and released his first EP on line in 2006.
Between 2006 and 2008, he also posted a popular series of five short videos on YouTube under the moniker of "yorktownrecreation" called "Fooling Around on Micro Korg" that show him improvising on the Micro Korg (and other keyboards, such as the Alesis Micron, Korg Nanokey, and Casio SA-21) and totalled over one million views after posting. He is among the self-proclaimed generation of "bedroom producers" who participated in the emergence of an international beat community based the accessibility of digital production technology and early Internet fora, such as MySpace, in the first decade of the 2000s.
In 2007, the
BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 1 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It specialises in modern popular music and current chart hits throughout the day. The station provides alternative genres at night, including electronica, dance, ...
producer
Benji B
Benjamin Benstead, known professionally as Benji B, is a British DJ, radio presenter, and record producer. A longtime BBC Radio producer and presenter, he has presented a weekly show on BBC Radio 1 since 2010 that highlights an eclectic mix of h ...
"discovered" Dorian Concept at the
Red Bull Music Academy
The Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) is a world-traveling series of music workshops and festivals that was founded in 1998 by Red Bull GmbH. The main five-week event is held in a different city each year. The public portion of its program is a festiv ...
in Toronto, where Paul Movahedi, a Viennese bandmate of his and RMBA participant, gave Benji B a CD with 10 unreleased Dorian Concept tracks that Benji B started airing on his show and playing in London clubs. BBC Radio 1's
Gilles Peterson
Gilles Jérôme Moehrle MBE (; born 28 September 1964), better known as Gilles Peterson (), is a French broadcaster, DJ, and record label owner. He founded the influential labels Acid Jazz and Talkin' Loud, and started his current label Brown ...
also started giving Dorian Concept air-time on his program "Worldwide" and included him in the line-up of worldwide events, and Dorian Concept subsequently started to receive invitations to major electronic music festivals. He also participated in the Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona in 2008 and has since been involved in a number of Red Bull Music Academy events.
His first album, ''When Planets Explode,'' appeared in 2009 preceded and was followed by a number of EPs and remixes. In 2010,
Ninja Tune
Ninja Tune is an English independent record label based in London. It has a satellite office in Los Angeles. It was founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More (better known as Coldcut) and managed by Peter Quicke and others.
Inspired by a visit ...
invited him to contribute a track, "Her Tears Taste Like Pears," to its twentieth anniversary box set, ''Ninja Tune XX'', and Ninja released an EP of his under the same title shortly thereafter. He performed at a number of Ninja XX events in Europe in 2010, including the Ninja gala celebration at Royal Albert Hall with the London Metropolitan Orchestra and the Cinematic Orcherstra in November, where he arranged and performed tracks from his Ninja EP for an ensemble including London Metropolitan string quartet accompaniment and the Cinematic Orchestra's saxophonist Tom Chant.
In 2011, Jason Swincoe invited him to continue his collaboration with Cinematic Orchestra by asking him to compose film music (with Tom Chant) for two avant-garde shorts by
Peter Tscherkassky
Peter Tscherkassky (born October 3, 1958) is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who works primarily with found footage. All of his work is done with film and heavily edited in the darkroom, rather than relying on recent advances in digital film. ...
, "Outer Space" and "Dream Work," for the Cinematic Orchestra's "In Motion" series in which musicians are asked to compose original scores for classic short films, which also gave him an additional opportunity to perform in a formal concert settings with string accompaniment at the
Barbican Centre
The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhi ...
in London and Tokyo. He also has performed in a more formal setting at the
Austrian Cultural Forum An Austrian Cultural Forum is an agency of the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, whose task consists of the cultural and scientific dialogue with artists and scientists of each particular host country.
A Cultural forum focuse ...
in New York City.
As of 2011, his touring and production activity dropped off with the exception of a few remixes, and he spend over two years working on a new sound and material for his second album, ''Joined Ends,'' which Ninja Tune released in October 2014. His third album, ''The Nature of Imitation,'' was released by Brainfeeder in 2018.
In 2020, his song "You're Untouchable" was featured on ''
Grand Theft Auto Online
''Grand Theft Auto Online'' is an online multiplayer action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It was released on 1 October 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, 18 November 2014 for PlayStation 4 and Xbo ...
'' radio station ''FlyLo FM'', through ''The Cayo Perico Heist'' update.
In 2021, he posted on his Facebook page that he has finished working on his next album.
Titled ''What We Do for Others'', the album will be released on 28 October 2022 via Brainfeeder.
Style
Although he had classical piano training as a child, he does not consider himself to be classically trained. As an autodidact, he identifies funk, hip-hop, jazz, and electronica as the primary influences for his music. His music cannot "easily be categorized, yet he has already developed his own, recognisable sound" as Benji B has observed in his blog in 2008.
Reviewers of his original releases have noted that his sound "fuses technical jazz flair with . . .programming skills
and strictly bumping beats with abstract electronica harmonics, . . ." and is "synthetic, electronic and beat-driven, and yet . . . musical." "Unconventional chord changes, expressive dynamics and quirky layers of counterpoint melodies,..." also have been identified as "...parts of his unmistakable musical voice,..." along with his ability to "...dot effortlessly through different genres and styles: from sublime electronica to hyperactive garage to avant-garde dancehall."
His trademark instrument for production and performance has been the
MicroKORG synthesizer. During solo live sets, he has used the
Ableton Live
Ableton Live is a digital audio workstation for macOS and Windows developed by the German company Ableton. In contrast to many other software sequencers, Ableton Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool f ...
software to play his tracks and improvises over them on the MicroKORG or manipulates them with the MicroKORG or the tools available on DJ consoles. On his "minimal set-up", examples are available online.
The release of ''Joined Ends'' in 2014 marked a departure from his established musical voice and reliance on the Microkorg as a platform for digital production and performance. Johnson purchased older retro equipment, including a Moog synthesizer, Wurlizter electronic piano, and Roland SH 101, and began to work with analogue media, including his own voice to create "an agile body of work filled with playful melodic earworms, complex textures, and vituosic transformations." Johnson noted that the "new gear was important because the Microkorg . . . really tied me down to my old sound . . .
rking with analogue gear was a way for me to put my focus back on playing. It feels like my first musical cycle is closing and the start of a new one." His aspiration was—in comparison to his frentic, established sound club—to "do something simple." His tracks are based on the technique of recording himself performing with analogue media and then "self-sampling" and reworking the analogue material in the course of production. In an interview, he has described himself as "an autodidact jazz musician, who samples himself." To perform this new material and sound, he also developed a new trio stage show with his long-standing Viennese friends and band-mates from JSBL: Paul Movahedi ("The Clonius") on bass and Clemens Bacher ("Cid Rim") on percussion.
After ''Joined Ends'' was released, Johnson toured extensively and then dropped out of sight again for over two years to work on ''The Nature of Imitation'', which appeared on his third label, Brainfeeder, as his third LP in 2018. For Johnson, ''The Nature of Imitation'' also represented an "aesthetic break" from ''Joined Ends'' and a process of "reinvention" that entailed returning "to my old approaches but from a completely different perspective" and resulted in a "brand new sound." This album is a synthesis of the widely disparate stylistic elements from of his previous two albums and simultaneously an expression of the "two Dorian Concepts": ". . . the hectic
ne. . . whirling like a tornado over the keys . . . of a defenseless microsynthisizer" and "the audodidactic, multi-instrumentalist, electronic chamber musician and detail-loving improvisor."
In light of the fact that Johnson has established himself in a distinct niche in the international electronic music scene, he is widely acknowledged by Austrian music critics as the leading Austrian electronic musician and composer of his generation. In 2019, Das Klangforum in Vienna, one of world's leading ensembles for contemporary music, commissioned Johnson to compose a forty-minute piece for a sixteen instrument ensemble: a task which marked a dramatic departure from his previous releases in terms of its format and orchestration. "Hyperopia" consists of eight "scenes" that explore the challenges, contours and interfaces of transcribing the timbres, rhythms, and distinctive voice of Johnson's digitally composed music for acoustic orchestral performance, and it eclectically references a wide spectrum of genres including minimal music, modal jazz, musique conrète, and electronic music from the 1990s. Its world premiere -- originally scheduled for April 2020 at the Konzerthaus in Vienna -- was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and belatedly took place under the auspices of the Transart Festival in Bolazano, Italy, on 9 September 2020, with a repeat performance at the Musikprotokoll Graz on 11 October 2020.
Discography
Albums
*''When Planets Explode'' (Kindred Spirits/Nod Navigators, 2009)
*''Joined Ends'' (
Ninja Tune
Ninja Tune is an English independent record label based in London. It has a satellite office in Los Angeles. It was founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More (better known as Coldcut) and managed by Peter Quicke and others.
Inspired by a visit ...
, 2014)
*''
The Nature of Imitation'' (
Brainfeeder
Brainfeeder is an independent record label based in Los Angeles, California, founded by Flying Lotus in 2008, focusing on electronic music and instrumental hip hop. It has signed artists such as Ras G, Samiyam, The Gaslamp Killer, Thundercat, The ...
, 2018)
*''What We Do for Others'' (Brainfeeder, 2022)
EPs
*''2 Feet For You'', (Circulations, 2008)
*''The Fucking Formula'', (Kindred Spirits/Nod Navigators, 2008)
*''Maximized Minimalization'' (Affine Records, 2008)
*''Sam Irl And Dorian Concept / Echo Skill Hifi - Untitled One / Gecko'' (Bonzzaj Recordings/A Few Among Others Records, 2008)
*''Trilingual Dance Sexperience'' (Affine Records, 2009)
*''Untitled'' (TLM Records, 2010)
*''Her Tears Taste Like Pears'' (
Ninja Tune
Ninja Tune is an English independent record label based in London. It has a satellite office in Los Angeles. It was founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More (better known as Coldcut) and managed by Peter Quicke and others.
Inspired by a visit ...
, 2011)
*''Toothbrush/Booth Thrust'' (
Brainfeeder
Brainfeeder is an independent record label based in Los Angeles, California, founded by Flying Lotus in 2008, focusing on electronic music and instrumental hip hop. It has signed artists such as Ras G, Samiyam, The Gaslamp Killer, Thundercat, The ...
, 2019)
Internet releases
and the Relevance of Wood'' (2005)*''A TrebleO Beat Tape'' (2008)
Tracks on compilation albums
* "Warm Cookies and Cold Milk" on ''Barracuda Astronauts'', (Vitamine-Source, 2004)
* "I'm a Basketball Mom" on ''Elevate Compilation'', (Elevate, 2008)
* "Sandwich Terror" on ''Blue Jemz-Beat Machine'', (Scion Audio/Visual, 2008)
* "Timetravellin" (Fatima & Dorian Concept) and "Do I know you?" (Fatima, Cohen, Cuthead & Dorian Concept) on ''Various Assets - Not For Sale: Red Bull Music Academy Barcelona 2008'', (RMBA, 2009)
* Synths on "Welcome to a Bluer Blue Sky" on Bluermutt's ''Decivilize After Consumption'', (Nexsound, 2009)
* "Be Tween" on ''Beat Dimensions, Vol. 2'', (Rush Hour, 2009)
* "RE: Haydn Remix" on ''RE:Haydn'', (Deutsche Grammaphone/Universal, 2009)
* "Her Tears Taste Like Pears" on CD 1 of the ''Ninja Tune XX'' box, (Ninja, 2010)
* "Harpoon Love" and "Row Out" on JSBL's ''What a Fine Mess We Made'', (Affine, 2011)
* "Outer Space" on ''The Cinematic Orchestra: In Motion # 1'' (featuring Dorian Concept & Tom Chant)
:26 (Ninja & Beat Records, 2012)
* "Dream Work" on ''The Cinematic Orchestra: In Motion # 1'' (featuring Dorian Concept & Tom Chant)
:46 (Ninja & Beat Records, 2012)
Remixes
* "Chico" (Dorian Concept Remix) on Fulgeance's ''Low Club EP'' (Musique Large, 2008)
* Dabrye, "Game Over" (Dorian Concept remix); Jamie Lidell, "A Little Bit Of Feel Good" (Dorian Concept remix); Phat Kat & Guilty Simpson, "Nightmare" (Dorian Concept remix); Three Six Mafia, "Stay Fly" (Dorian Concept remix)
preceding the release of his album, ''When Planets Explode'')
* "Emora" (Dorian Concept Remix) on The Clonius' ''Adroit Adventures'' (Ubiquity Records, 2009)
* "The Light" (Dorian Concept Remix) on Some Freak, Andreya Triana & Ritornell's ''The Light Remixes'' (Wald Entertainment, 2009)
* "Light Up Bright Fires" (Dorian Concept Remix) on PVT's ''Light up Bright Fires'', (Warp, 2010)
* Dabrye's "Game Over" (Dorian Concept Remix) on ''Arousal (2) - 404 Mixtape'' (Error Broadcast, 2010)
* Clifford Gilberto's "Deliver The Weird" (Dorian Concept Remix) on CD 6 of the ''Ninja Tune XX'' box, (Ninja Tune, 2010)
* "Draw" (Dorian Concept Remix) on Cid Rim's "Cid Rim", (LuckyMe, 2012)
* Letherette's "D & T" (Dorian Concept Remix), (Ninja Tune, 2013)
*Taylor McFerrin – Postpartum (Dorian Concept Remix), (Brainfeeder, 2016)
*Chitos Hajime – Honen Bushi (Dorian Concept Remix), (Universal Records) 2019
References
{{Authority control
Austrian record producers
Living people
1984 births
Austrian keyboardists
Austrian electronic musicians
Brainfeeder artists
Ninja Tune artists
Austrian jazz keyboardists