Words by Anton Spice

“I have a lot of respect for what young people can accomplish,” says Oliver Johnson, the Vienna-based producer known as Dorian Concept.

Since his debut album 13 years ago, Johnson’s livewire machine funk electronics have illuminated albums for Kindred Spirits, Ninja Tune and Brainfeeder, but today he is in a more reflective mood.

“When I look back, I can remember that drive. It was maybe a mixture of escapism and this boldness that I needed to find my place in society.” About to release his fourth album, What We Do For Others, Johnson is turning to the past to think about his future. A time defined by the pixelated glare of video games, cheap synths and Web 1.0 music blogs, the influences and instruments of the early 2000s are now as distant as 1982 would have felt then. In them Johnson hears not sentimentality so much as a kind of fearless, punk energy that first animated him as a teenager.

 Across a trio of acclaimed solo records and credits with Flying Lotus, Thundercat and The Cinematic Orchestra, Johnson developed a virtuoso ability to loop and layer rhythms and melodies that wriggle like a box of frogs. A largely self-taught pianist, he questions the merit of terms like “electronic music”, given that almost nothing he plays is pre-programmed. Instead, there is an element of performance to what he does that feels much closer to the physicality of a jazz musician than the static designs of a laptop producer.

On What We Do For Others, this relationship with his compositional process comes to the fore. Creating studio conditions more familiar to live bands, he would record tracks in a matter of hours, letting his subconscious take the lead. In that sense, What We Do For Others feels like about as close as pure a “Dorian Concept” album as you could hope for, and one which finds its way from ‘Outside’ [the album’s first track] to ‘Inside’ [its last] by letting go of all preconceptions and expectations.

 Now in his late ‘30s, something is beginning to shift. Johnson calls What We Do For Others a “transitional record”, and as he steps into a new phase, Dorian Concept the ‘producer’ is beginning to toy with the idea of calling himself a ‘composer’ instead. “When I really look at what I do, it feels more like composing,” he reflects. “I think it's just been claimed a bit too much by certain people, but it's nice because it pisses people off when you've not studied it, and you still say that you're a composer.” It’s good to hear his irreverent punk spirit remains.

The album title, What We Do For Others, suggests an interest in understanding how you relate to other people's expectations of your music. Is there also an element of challenging your own too?

Yeah exactly. In general, I think about the complexities of the relationship that everyone has with the outside world, the lives we all have in our inside worlds, and how different that experience can be for everyone. When I was growing up, learning jazz on a self-taught basis and getting into music production, a lot of that was about finding my place in the world and almost proving a point. Something about it has been very fulfilling, but I think that with this record, it's a different question that I'm asking and that is supposed to help me find some different answers.

What was the scene that you felt most plugged into at that time?

 I think my peak feeling of being part of a group of like-minded people was the MySpace era. There were so many micro-scenes. You had Hudson Mohawke [from Scotland], Dimlite [from Switzerland], Brainfeeder in LA was starting off at the same time, and there were people in Tokyo doing something similar. Obviously, this whole “beats” thing has become something very different now - it's the lo-fi playlist music – but back then it just felt very punk. It was just all these people working on different cracked software, with weird early 2000s synth devices or samplers that they would just be figuring out how to work. It felt like everyone was just winging it, but it made for a very interesting creative environment.

What We Do For Others also has more of a live sound. I was wondering whether this was something that also came from wanting to make good on a youthful ambition to play in a band.

 Yeah, it’s interesting. I notice that with people who have missed out on something they didn't do at a certain point in time. For example, the people who didn’t get their high school diploma tend to be some of the smartest people I know because they always have this urge to prove that it doesn’t matter, that they didn’t need it, but at the same time it can remain an issue. And for me, it's been the same thing. I've definitely overcompensated for my need to prove that I'm a musician because I never studied it. I wonder if there's even a hint of resentment sometimes of saying “I can do all of this alone, I'll show you.”

In the context of this album, I was fascinated by the fact that in the ‘60s and ‘70s when you had a band and you wanted to make an album, you were literally sent to the studio for a day or two, you’d have a budget and you had to get it done. Thinking about that in an electronic music setting fascinated me, so I just tried to replicate that by having more of a session approach when it came to making tracks.

How different is that as a way of working for you?

I definitely have an obsessive streak and I think that with the album before [The Nature of Imitation], a major limitation was overworking and spending time day after night in the studio, getting it down perfectly. I just saw a bit of a dead end to that approach. I also feel that I'm now slowly embracing the performer side of what I do more and more, and have the urge to let go of the idea of an album being this big thing.

What was the balance like between the compositional and improvisational elements of each track?

 I feel like it's a bit of both. I do notice that when I go to the studio and try to do something quickly, there is this muscle memory locked into my brain. A lot of the tempos are similar on the album. It was almost like finding the thing that's most ingrained in my creative psyche and then trying to get into a bit of a flow state. I noticed that there were certain rhythms that my subconscious prefers or that I’ve been practising for so long that it's just the first thing that I go to. It felt like an improvisational composition in that sense. You do approach it with a free mind, but you're aware of all the biases you have when making music.

Is there a tension between employing that session-based approach and the concept of live performance in electronic music production?

 I sometimes get confused about the term “electronic music”, because it's so hard to distinguish when it actually becomes that. I have never really used an arpeggio or any programmed pattern. Even the drums, everything is played live. You can record acoustic instruments and do such weird things with them, and it becomes electronic music, but then there are such nice examples of electronic music that sound so organic that I'd be tempted to not call it that anymore. The ambiguity of it is interesting and attracts me to it.

It's true that the term “electronic” is often used as a genre when it is actually more of a medium.

Yeah exactly.

Speaking of instrumentation, do you have a process which determines how you start making a track?

 It's a bit of a case-by-case thing, but one thing I noticed is that I prefer having a set of equipment lined up. It feels like it helps me draw the painting that I want - you just choose the colours before you start. A lot of the things that were interesting to me were from the era between 2000-2005, which was also the time when I was a teenager and got into music. This is not a sentimental album but maybe an album about me looking into my past, looking back to my origins. An exploration of that time, with a bit of distance.

 It's funny that through this conversation, it sounds like I was getting the band back together. There was one Roland sampler from the year 2000 that I got, the VP-9000, that just sounds so cool when you use it with your voice. The guitarist was the Roland SH-101, all the drums came from the Korg Kronos, and the bass was always the Moog Prodigy.

Having watched your Korg Kronos videos on YouTube, I'm interested in whether playing drum patterns on a keyboard instrument adds a percussive influence to the way you play a melody or vice versa, whether it encourages you to play percussion in a more melodic way?

 It really confirms my preference for me. There are many people who like it when the keys of their keyboards are weighted, but for me, that's always the worst thing because I’ve always loved it when you hit a note and it just bounces back instantly. There is something about my playing that has always been very percussive and it wasn’t until I started playing drums on the Kronos that I noticed that such a big part of what I do is related to the rhythmic side of things.

You spoke of tracks as like paintings you have in your mind. Do you take inspiration from mediums outside music?

Yeah definitely. Film music and music for theatre have always been an obsession. There's something about a soundtrack that always transported the message so well for me as a kid, and it's something that I still love finding out about. Seeing how people figure out what sound should accompany a scene or a certain character. Peter And The Wolf was such a perfect example in explaining which instrument was most likely to represent the fear you would have of a wolf. I think my source of learning how emotions and music work was through film more than music.

Speaking of those early years, what relationship do you have with the work you’ve made in the past and how do you feel you've evolved as an artist in that time?

Up until the ten-year mark, it's hard to look back because you're always thinking about progressing or moving away from whatever you’ve done before. But the older you get, the more you can embrace it because it's so far away that it becomes a part of the past.

I think now maybe I'm at a point where the most important thing for me is not to maintain my career as much as it is to maintain my joy for making music. The hardest thing when you get older is to stay inspired. A lot of this really comes back to what I said before, where it's about reconnecting with myself as a teenager because it felt like before I had an audience there was something else that was driving me.

Reflection as a strategy for inspiration?

 Yeah exactly. Sometimes you have to be willing to learn from your former self and just be honest enough that maybe you could have done things differently.

Are you also looking forwards as well as back?

Yeah definitely. When I look at the future there are some bigger questions there. What else is it that I want to do? Two years ago, I had my first offer from Klangforum, an ensemble for contemporary music in Vienna, where I wrote music for 60 musicians. It was such an interesting experience and made me think, am I willing to see myself as a composer at some point? Do I have the courage to really move in a new direction?

I feel like I've always done that very smoothly, but there are definitely some leaps that I feel like taking now. That's what I meant when I said that this album feels transitional. I am just building the courage to surprise myself a little bit more. It's a very broad image of the future.

What We Do For Others is out now.