"Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Anything done right is worth doing all the time."
Name: Dorian Sky Douma.
Contents: English, Scottish, Dutch, Irish. Male. 24. 6'3". Dirty Blonde hair, blue/grey/green eyes.
Current Location: Between Kensington Market and Little Portugal, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
1990 - 2006 Locations: Between the Park, Fairfield, Cook st. Village, James Bay and downtown Victoria BC. And The Plateaux, Montreal. And Halifax and Prince Edward Island. And Junction City, California. And Saltspring Island. And Arlee, Montana.
1982 - 1990 Location: Porter Creek Trailer Park and Echo Valley, Whitehorse, Yukon.
Check out my "blog" , Message Me, Forward me to a friend,Add me as a friend,Favourite me,or whatever.
A Great White Bird
Screw myspace's retarded flash mp3 player. You can stream and download everything at agreatwhitebird.com/music .
I made a video for 87 Pontiac Dream by Boards of Canada!
Fan-made video for 87 Pontiac Dream by Boards of CanadaAdd to My Profile | More Videos
Check out my photo journal!
I moved to Toronto, by the way. I'll answer the questions everybody's asked me here:
Why Toronto? There are technicalities (financial, not legal) that prevent me from moving to Britain or Europe. I'd never been to Toronto before, but I got the sense that it would be my favourite north-american city, and so far it really, really is.
What are you going to do there? Do you have a job lined up yet? An apartment? I'm staying with my friend Rachel, looking for work and starting a band. Sounds boring but I didn't know I was capable of such excitement and joy.
When will we see you again? Are you going to visit? Well, a round-trip ticket to Toronto can be as cheap as $400 after taxes and fees etc, and takes about six hours from Victoria. It's about $30 for a 6-hour rideshare here from Montreal, and about the same for an 8-hour one from NYC. That's my recommendation.
I tried calling you but your phone doesn't work! I know, it's retarded, to switch to a Toronto number I had to give up my other one and there was no way to leave a message on there or anything, or forward it, it's fucked. Just message me and I'll give you my new number.
I'm sad you're gone Dorian! Don't be sad, fool! It's Victoria's making you sad, not me being gone. My absence is just a reminder of what a meaningless accumulation of irrelevance Victoria is. Leave before you stop making sense to yourself, that's my recommendation.
Innacurate bio
Having won four awards for audio research in his late teens, Dorian is currently an extraneous signal analyst for the European Space Agency aboard the International Space Station during the summer. His winter months are spent studying the varied wildlife of Canada's north.
Official (and fake) equipment list:
I rely heavily on vintage analogue gear to get my sound. It's essential to my work. I do my multitracking with a Tascam 8-track tapedeck (from the 70s), and I do all my mastering on 2-inch tape... with... some kind of 2-inch tapedeck and this really cult-famous old german compressor. I do field recording with a 1/4-inch reel-to-reel recorder and a famous German wide-diaphragm mic from the 70s.
For synthesis I use a Korg PolySix, Roland Jupiter 8, Moog Modular, ARP 2600, and Yamaha CS-80. I use an old akai sampler for breaks, a Fairlight for sequencing, and TR-808, TR-606, and a Sequential Drumtraks for percussion. I have a mellotron that I've modified so I can use my own tapes in it. I've also made my own monophonic mellotron-esque instrument, which is controlled with theramin-style rods. Except you don't hear it in any of my music, even though it sounds amazing. I'm... saving it for live shows.
I've mixed everything at... my own studio in... somewhere... the Skylab space station. The acoustics are great, and it's the only orbiting object which meets my electrical requirements. Also... weightlessness makes my synths' oscillators sound thicker.
Actual equipment list
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ESS Tempest speakers
Dual-p4 windows thing with a bunch of hard drives hanging out of the case - should have bought a bigger tower.
Grado headphones - the $120 ones. Made in fucking Brooklyn. If you have a pair of these, don't waste $30 on new foam when the foam things come off, just do what I did and cut your own out of the foam in the box they come in!
Arturia software rip-offs of classic Korg Polysix and MS-20, the Moog modular and minimoog (rhymes with road, not dude), CS-80V and ARP 2600.
Synths of my own design in Reaktor, as well as Reaktor's great recreation of the Juno series of synths
Studio Projects microphone from Long & McQuade. Great sound but I should have just gotten a second-hand stage mic.
Tascam US-428. Lots of good features, but not recommended. Its drivers are unstable, and I hate Tascam now. Fuck them.
Cheap Roland midi keyboard, now with broken pitchbend - yay!
Awesome old Roland drum pad thing, with classic old Roland drum sounds. About 20 times more useful than a 909, can be played with fingers or drumsticks, does MIDI out, and the touch sensitivity is amazing.
Important things at the moment
I'm developing a completely awesome brand of party music. You've never heard anything so perfect for dancing since the twist.
I'm also still writing really trippy electronic music of course. It'll get simpler and simpler until it's just drones, maybe in a few years. The first Bibio record reminded me of a bunch of old guitar recordings I have on 4-track tapes, and how much I love them. So I'm going through those and putting songs together out of them. My first such project is an alternate soundtrack to the original British version of The Wicker Man. Another project is an arpeggiated synth experiment I'm working on. I'm also going back to doing psychedelic dance techno live (if you can imagine really good trance, except better).
Around mid-2006 I thought: "I want to put together some kind of record label that only puts out awesome trippy downtempo music (I know there are several), or maybe a compilation or a website about it, just on the subject of this type of music, would be a better idea. There's Drum & Bass Arena for example, and then there's We are the Music Makers for the IDM heavyweights, but it would be so much cooler to just make a big list of everybody who's doing this internationally, and like some kind of forum for us to all chat about our tape bouncing experiments, field recordings, old broken gear we've sampled, 4-track tapedecks vs. ableton live etc... wouldn't that be wonderful?"
So I did it, I made The Air Traffic Radiophonic Workshop , and a half-dozen people joined, and I started some topics, and so far it's just me and another guy chatting about tape regeneration and what is bibio talking about."