A Great White Bird profile picture

A Great White Bird

Just keep tape bouncing it 'til it sounds right!

About Me

"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 Canada

Add 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

    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."

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 11/16/2005
Band Website: dorianlately.blogspot.com/
Influences:

Influences?

"Everything by..."
Yanni, The Russian Futurists, Broadcast, Stereolab, Yanni, Belle & Sebastien, Joanna Newsom, Saturday Index, Milieu, Hrdvsion, Resfilter, Brian Eno, Bibio, Yanni, Blade Runner, Boards of Canada, Autechre, Radiohead, The Magnetic Fields, certainly not Kraftwerk, oh no, never, Trans Am, Tortoise... and Yanni.

"I only like their old/new/good/lo-fi/demo/pop/underground stuff"
Moby's "My Weakness" and "One of These Mornings," Kitty Craft's album "beats and breaks from the flower patch," the song "Lines and Lines" by the Spinanes, the song "Heart" by the Stars,

"I am so cool because I list non-music influences"
The National Film Board of Canada circa '60s - '80s, the Tibetan Vajrayana branch of Buddhism, Vice Magazine, science fiction films... etc etc.the Yukon, Montreal, Prince Edward Island, California, Seattle (kind of), William Gibson (big time).

"Being part of the internet generation is better than being part of the hippie generation because of:"
Wikipedia Myspace. I've never found so much good music and interesting people anywhere. It's like the online equivalent of Montreal in the summer.
Vice Magazine is now online. It's like the internet version of crack cocaine - and they don't use Flash!!!
YouTube
Vintage Synth Explorer and Synth Museum and Ruskeys - Slavik Synth museum
MusicThing

The Wicker Man (70s original, not the ridiculous new one).

The only place I've found the full movie is on eMule ED2K.

Style Wars: New York Grafitti & Hip Hop, 1982


Sounds Like:

Actually sounds like:
The closing soundtrack to an 80s film, heard in a dream.

I'm trying to remember all the bands I've never heard that people have said "you're obviously listening to a lot of..."and: Boards of Canada, Autechre, Radiohead, Trans Am, Photek, Add (n) to (x), Brian Eno, Polypore, Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk... um...


Record Label: Air Traffic (just my own little CD-R + MP3 thing)
Type of Label: None

My Blog

About a zillion people thought I should see "what the bleep do we know?"

So I saw the movie, and I had the feeling all along it would kind of suck. It was produced like a scientology video, and while a whole bunch of interesting facts were presented, they were strung toget...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Sat, 25 Aug 2007 04:15:00 PST

A Great White Bird release on I Need It Records

I'm so happy, overjoyed actually, to announce that I Need It Records has put out an EP of my own music, entitled "Old friends and New Flings," as their 5th release. I'm all giddy to be part of their l...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:11:00 PST

Top ten top ten lists

Dorian's top ten top ten lists for 2006 - 2007Here's the format for music: Artistname Album name of particular interest "Trackname of particular interest"Rad Toronto Music I've just discovered since c...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Fri, 09 Feb 2007 05:50:00 PST

Good for me! Finally some top friends editing!

So I finally tackled my top friends list. 16 people and bands that have immediate meaning in my life, bands that are obscure enough that it's not like "yeah of course he likes boards of canada" and pe...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Sun, 21 Jan 2007 06:41:00 PST

Check out my Saturday Index remix!

The new track, Parallel Summers, is a remix of this great track by Saturday Index!Having a great time in Toronto - and i've got a new number, so message me if you want it. my old one doesn't work....
Posted by A Great White Bird on Tue, 16 Jan 2007 07:28:00 PST

TO in 11h08m!

I'll be landing in Toronto in 11 hours and 8 minutes.I've said goodbye to everyone, I'm almost done packing, and with any luck I'll get to spend some quality time with my mom before going to bed. She'...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Sat, 13 Jan 2007 11:54:00 PST

leaving songs

Trans Am - FutureworldStereolab - Brian Eno - Needle in the Camera's EyeLadytron - Blue JeansABBA - "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)"Bibio - At the Chase...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:38:00 PST

Happy new years from my leg muscles!

Check out my new years party pictures at my flickr page!...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Wed, 03 Jan 2007 09:26:00 PST

Dorian's finding-great-new-music method.

1 Figure out what your favourite band is right now, that you discovered by accident or whatever, that excites the hell out of you, and you've never heard anything really like it. Doesn't matter if you...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Tue, 12 Dec 2006 01:11:00 PST

I'm on a Manitoba Music playlist!

Check it out: Manitobamusic charted me (here) along with a whole bunch of other crazy music by people who either live in Manitoba or are on a Manitoba label. The song of course is "Salut La Neige," wh...
Posted by A Great White Bird on Sat, 02 Dec 2006 02:18:00 PST