UnauthorizedBiography: Physics, Tainted Love, Messaien, and the Synclavier—What do these things have in common? Mike Thorne likes his music confrontational and intense. When he first graduated with a BA in Physics from Oxford, he had scarcely even heard of the Beatles; he'd been too busy studying 20th Century composers like Schoenberg and Messiaen. But then he discovered the Stones and the Doors and became a fan of pop music with muscle. Since then his musical interests have been 50/50 pop and classical.
Keyboardist, composer (studied with Buxton Orr at the Guildhall School), journalist (editor of Sound on Sound), and entrepreneur (he bought one of the very first Synclaviers and directed The Synclavier Company in '92), Thorne was also the producer behind albums by Wire, Soft Machine, The Shirts, Jone Cale, Soft Cell, Nina Hagen, Bronski Beat, Roger Daltrey, Communards, Sir Michael Tippett, Laurie Anderson, China Crisis, Hilly Kristal, Peter Murphy, Blur, and Information Society among others. In 1981, he hit the commercial jackpot, producing what is arguably technopop's biggest hit ever, Soft Cell's Tainted Love.
Thorne's New York studio, The Stereo Society, has evolved into what he describes as "one of the most powerful music rooms in the world." But he's not blindly addicted to technology-for-technology's-sake. "Too much music is driven by technology and the process..." he writes, "But if we control technology, we find new means of expression, new ways of waking people up."
His latest venture is http://www.stereosociety.com, a new web site where you can find his own first album along with new albums from Hilly Kristal, the Reds, and the 'oddly compelling microtonal composer and bassoon virtuoso' from Brooklyn, Johnny Reinhard. Thorne is also working on a book, Music in the Machine, which will also be available from his website.
For more details, see his bio in the Billboard Encyclopedia http://www.stereosociety.com/thencyc.html
