After nearly 20 years away from the music business, British synth-pop icon Thomas Dolby launched his return last year with a passion - or rather, several passions.
First there was a transmedia game, The Floating City, which was "set against a dystopian vision of the 1940s that could have perhaps existed if WWII had turned out a lot differently," he explains. Participants from around the world took part in the three-month long cyber-game, which wound down shortly before the release of Dolby's corresponding album, A Map of the Floating City.
Recorded in a solar-powered lifeboat that sits on his lawn in England, the new album, Dolby says, is a "travelogue across three imaginary continents" that represents his own journey from England to the United States and his recent return to his childhood home of East Anglia on the North Sea.
"It's very autobiographical with some embellishment of the truth," Dolby, 53, said by phone from Austin, where he performed at SXSW for the start of his 26-city U.S. tour. "I like to think of each song as sort of a mini-movie set to music. It's all storytelling."
And fans get to tell a story themselves at Dolby's concerts. Parked outside each venue is a chrome and brass trailer dubbed "The Time Capsule" that's fully wired for high-tech recording. Fans can step inside to make their own 30-second video clip, which automatically updates to a YouTube channel (time-capsule.tv).
"They can use those 30 seconds any way they'd like," Dolby explains. "They have to quickly figure out what kind of a message they want to leave for the future. It's up to them."
Long before the retro-futurist cultural movement known as Steampunk got its name, Dolby was enthralling 1980s audiences with witty, synthesizer-drenched songs like "She Blinded Me With Science," and "Hyperactive," all the while inadvertently cultivating his own mad-scientist persona.
Dolby worked with everyone from Bowie (at Live Aid) to Foreigner (that's his pre-fame synth-playing on 1981's "Urgent" and "Waiting for a Girl Like You"). But, by 1990, he made his way to the Silicon Valley near the dawn of the Internet Age. There, he formed Beatnik, which developed the ringtone synthesizer now used in more than three billion phones worldwide.
"That kept me very busy, but my appetite for business is way less than being the creative hub of things," Dolby said. Longtime musical director of the annual four-day TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference, Dolby found himself continually thinking about "the idea of getting back out there with my own music."
"I didn't harbor any illusion of topping the charts, but I felt I still had something to say, and I knew I needed to get back to my first love - music," he recalled. Relocating from California to England was the first step in creating A Map of the Floating City. Working with musicians such as Mark Knopfler, Imogen Heap, and Regina Spektor, Dolby says the final product sounds "rather organic and not particularly electronic, with the story itself dictating the idiom of the music."