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Thomas Dolby — news, coverage & facts — IJR

The Sole Inhabitant

Following his involvement in Beatnik, Dolby returned to his musical career in 2006. He performed his first public solo show in 15 years at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco, California, on 21 January 2006, surprising the crowd who were there to see local band Notorious. He then launched an American tour, the Sole Inhabitant Tour, on 12 April 2006, comprising a string of small dates in California, a science education benefit in Boulder, Colorado, and gigs across America before receptive crowds.

The United States leg of the "Sole Inhabitant Tour 2006" was captured on a "live" CD and DVD. The CD represents a recording of two gigs played by Dolby at Martyrs in Chicago, while the DVD was filmed at the Berklee Performance Center at Berklee College of Music. The DVD also includes a 30-minute interview and a lecture by Dolby at the college. Both the CD and DVD were released in November 2006. Dolby autographed and numbered the first 1,000 copies of the CD and DVD.

A show at the 800-capacity Scala club in London was booked for 3 July 2006 as a warm-up for Dolby's Hyde Park set opening for Depeche Mode. The show sold out in a matter of days and prompted Dolby to reprioritise the UK, resulting in him moving with his family from California back to England and in a nine-date Sole Inhabitant tour of the UK in October 2007, coinciding with the release of a lavish box set of the Sole Inhabitant CD and DVD by UK independent label Invisible Hands Music.

Thomas toured throughout the months of November and December 2006 with electronic musician BT. This tour included a version of "Airwaves" that BT added his own technique to, which was the opening song on the UK leg of the Sole Inhabitant tour (sans BT).

Thomas Dolby's 15 March 2007 performance at the South by Southwest festival was released as the live EP Thomas Dolby & The Jazz Mafia Horns, Live at SxSW (with musicians from San Francisco's Jazz Mafia collective).

The 2007 UK Sole Inhabitant tour included three new songs previously played on the US tour, one called "Your Karma Hit My Dogma", another called "Jealous Thing", and a cover version of the Special AKA's "What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend." "Your Karma Hit My Dogma" was inspired by Kevin Federline's unauthorised use of a sample from Mobb Deep's "Got It Twisted," which in turn had used an authorised sample of "She Blinded Me with Science." The tag line from that story became the title of the song. The wording was lifted by Thomas from a bumper sticker on a car that he saw whilst living in the San Francisco Bay area. In a move close to performance art, Dolby tried to post a 'cease and desist' legal letter on Kevin Federline's MySpace page when other attempts to contact him proved fruitless. The song is on the Live at SxSW EP.

The second new song, "Jealous Thing", was performed at least at The Graduate in Cambridge and London's Islington Academy on the UK tour in Summer 2007 and features a Bossa-Nova type rhythm.

A Map of the Floating City

In 2010 Dolby began work on a new studio album entitled A Map of the Floating City. The album is divided into three parts, with the first two parts initially made available to members of The Flat Earth Community Forum, Dolby's online community. Each of the three digital EPs takes its name from one of the three sections of the full-length album that later followed. The first EP, Amerikana, was released digitally on 16 June 2010. The second EP is entitled Oceanea, and was released on 29 November 2010. Due to favourable reviews and radio airplay, Oceanea was released commercially on 28 March 2011. The third section of the album, entitled Urbanoia, was not released as a download or physical CD, but the songs were premiered online as part of the Floating City game (see below).

Contributors to the album include Kevin Armstrong, Matthew Seligman (both had played together with him on The Flat Earth and as part of David Bowie's Live Aid appearance), Bruce Woolley, drummer Liam Genockey, guitarist Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Regina Spektor, Natalie MacMaster, Eddi Reader and Imogen Heap.

In a 2010 press release he was quoted as saying:

I marvel at the new landscape of the music business – distribution via the Internet and recording technologies I barely dreamed of when I started out," he continues. "But this album does not sound electronic at all. I have zero desire to add to the myriad of machine-based, synth-driven grooves out there. The Net has made a music career approachable for thousands of bands – but I hear too few single-minded voices among them. What I do best is write songs, tell stories."

"The new songs are organic and very personal. This album is a travelogue across three imaginary continents. In Amerikana I'm reflecting with affection on the years I spent living in the USA, and my fascination with its roots music. Urbanoia is a dark place, a little unsettling ... I'm not a city person. And in Oceanea I return to my natural home on the windswept coastline.

A Map of the Floating City was recorded in the "Nutmeg of Consolation", Dolby's recording studio built within a 1930s lifeboat and powered entirely by renewable energy, which is located in the garden of Dolby's beach house on England's North Sea coast.

Headspace and Beatnik

In 1993, Dolby established the Headspace company. This was intended to provide tools for interactive audio, as at the time Dolby was frustrated about the lack of interactive audio tools. During this period, Dolby worked on a number of video game soundtracks through his company. The company was later approached to create MIDI-based music for WebTV, leading to Dolby composing several key music tracks that were bundled with the devices.

Following the acquisition of the company Igor's Software Laboratories in 1996, which was also involved with creating audio for WebTV, Headspace developed a new downloadable file format designed specifically for Internet usage called Rich Music Format with the RMF file extension. It had the advantage of small file size like MIDI but allowed recorded sampled sounds to be included at a higher bitrate for better overall reproduction. RMF music files could be played in a browser using the free Beatnik Player plug-in, and were also encrypted to prevent unauthorised duplication, while info such as the composer and copyright information could also be embedded within the files. In 1999, Headspace, Inc., was renamed Beatnik, Inc., and later shifted its focus towards software synthesizers for mobile phones, which it licensed to mobile phone manufacturers including Nokia. As truetone ringtones eventually overtook polyphonic ringtones in popularity, Beatnik went defunct in 2011.

Dolby stepped down from his position as CEO in 2002, feeling that the business was no longer interesting to him, although he remained on the board. This subsequently led to him founding Retro Ringtones LLC, which produced the RetroFolio ringtone asset management software suite for companies involved in the mobile phone ringtone business, as well as offering ringtones that could be purchased by businesses. These ringtones largely consisted of sound clips such as animal sounds, celebrity quotes and sci-fi sound effects, as well as polyphonic covers of popular theme songs. At the 2004 second annual Mobile Music Awards in Miami, Florida, RetroFolio won "Best of Show" and "Best New Technology" awards. The company ended business in 2005 and has since been suspended by the Secretary of State of California.

Dolby created hundreds of digital polyphonic ringtones on mobile phones, both at Beatnik and Retro Ringtones. He was often a speaker at technology conferences such as Comdex, Websphere, and Nokia.

Thomas Dolby

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Thomas Dolby

🎬 Filmography

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Thomas Dolby across IJR

Article

Article

Early life

Stage name

Music career

Solo music career

The Golden Age of Wireless

Dolby's Cube

The Flat Earth

Aliens Ate My Buick

Astronauts & Heretics

The Sole Inhabitant

2009 reissues

A Map of the Floating City

A Map of the Floating City game

Session and production work

Film and video games

The Invisible Lighthouse

Headspace and Beatnik

Other endeavours

Virtual reality

TED Conference

Academic career

Equipment

Personal life

Awards and nominations

Discography

🎬 Filmography

Thomas Dolby across IJR