Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
Dorian Concept (born Oliver Thomas Johnson in Vienna in 1984) is a Austrian composer, producer, and keyboard artist, whose work draws on an eclectic variety of sources including modal and free jazz, funk, hip-hop, and electronic, 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 and has periodically toured as a keyboarder for Flying Lotus (with Richard Spaven on drums).
Biography
He studied multimedia art with a focus on acoustic engineering and graphics at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg from 2005-2009. During this period, he won Elektronikland Salzburg prizes for composition in electronic music in 2005 and 2007.
Between 2006 and 2008, he posted a popular series of 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).
In 2007, the BBC1 producer Benji B "discovered" Dorian Concept at the Red Bull Music Academy 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 1's Gilles Peterson also started giving Dorian Concept air-time on his program "Worldwide" and included him in the line-ups 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.
Style
Although he had classical piano training as a child, the main influences for his music are hip-hop, jazz, and electronica. As the BBC 1 radio broadcaster and British DJ Benji B observed in his blog Deviation in 2008, Dorian Concept’s music cannot “easily be categorised, yet he has already developed his own, recognisable sound.". Reviewers of his debut album When Planets Explode (2009) noted that he has taken stylistic cues from a wide “blend of sources” and that his tracks reflect a “clearly unique style” and "synthesis of various inspirations.” Reviewers note 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.”
His main instrument for production and performance is the MicroKORG synthesizer. During live sets, he uses the Ableton software to play his tracks and improvises over them on the MicroKORG or manipulates them with the MicroKORG or the tools available on DJ consules.
