Featuring guest appearances by Imogen Heap, Mark Knopfler, Bruce Woolley, and Regina Spektor, the album A Map of the Floating City is set for release later this year and will be Thomas Dolby's first since 1992's Astronauts & Heretics.
Leading up to the release of A Map of the Floating City Dolby released Amerikana, a series of three digital EPs, on June 16 exclusively to his online fan community, The Flat Earth Society.
Thomas Dolby has been recording his new material on the Nutmeg, a renewable energy-powered studio he built on a restored 1930s lifeboat, originally part of a pair onboard a British merchant vessel serving in the South Seas. Nutmeg sits in the garden of Dolby's home on England's East Anglia coast and all of the recording gear inside is powered entirely by solar and wind.
During daylight hours the Nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of its wheelhouse, as well as from a 450-watt turbine up on the mast - "quite apropos for a guy who released a single called 'Windpower' back in 1982."
Dolby has said that the new songs are, "organic and very personal," and that he marvels 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."
