Thomas Dolby’s impressive recording & production career now stretches over 30 years. His commercial breakthrough came with the 1982 release of his very first album  – ‘The Golden Age Of Wireless’ which featured the hit ‘She Blinded Me With Science’. Go back a year and Dolby’s innovative synthesiser work was already making its mark – he wrote the mesmeric synth intro to Foreigner’s ‘Waiting for A Girl Like You’. In 1983 he appeared on Def Leppard’s ‘Pyromania’ album. In the same year Dolby produced US rap wonders Whodini who released an absolute B Boy classic with ‘Magic’s Wand’. 1984 saw the release of Dolby’s second album, the expansive masterwork ‘The Flat Earth’, which raised the decade’s artistic bar considerably. ‘The Flat Earth’ featured Dolby’s biggest single success – ‘Hyperactive!’ – a fine piece of pop-art funk that was originally written for Michael Jackson. It still sounds like the eccentric English cousin of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’.

Between 1985-1992, Thomas Dolby released two more albums – collaborating with George Clinton on the bold ‘Aliens Ate My Buick’ – and 1991’s ‘Astronauts And Heretics’, which featured Grateful Dead supremo Jerry Garcia alongside Siouxsie And The Banshees’ Budgie. In addition to his solo output, Dolby produced Prefab Sprout (the classic Prefab albums ‘Steve McQueen’ & ‘Jordan: The Comeback’), Joni Mitchell (‘Dog Eat Dog’ album), appeared with David Bowie at Live Aid, worked with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters at The Wall in Berlin, and performed at the Grammy’s with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock.

The five-time Grammy®-nominated British artist quit the music business in the early ’90s and spent many years in Silicon Valley, where his tech company Beatnik Inc. created the ringtone synthesizer embedded in more than three billion mobile phones shipped by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and others. Now retired from Beatnik, Dolby has returned to his native U.K. and recorded an album of brand new songs in a renewable energy-powered studio he built aboard a 1930s lifeboat in the garden of his beach house on England’s North Sea coast. 

Of the album, which is divided into three parts, Dolby says, “The new songs are organic and very personal. A Map Of The Floating City is a travelogue across three imaginary continents: In Amerikana I’m reflecting with affection on the years I spent living in the U.S.A., 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.”

“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, so I’m returning to what I do best, which is write songs, tell stories.”

To help tell his stories, Dolby has enlisted an impressive cast of guest musicians. Legendary guitarist Mark Knopfler helps drive the epic ‘17 Hills,’ a song about a pair of hapless lovers and a jailbreak. Natalie MacMaster, the Cape Breton fiddler, adds spice to two songs. Scottish singer Eddi Reader takes a front seat on the ethereal ‘Oceanea’. Bruce Woolley (Camera Club) plays theremin. And Regina Spektor has a cameo as an East European waitress on ‘Evil Twin Brother.’