Biography
Stephan Whitlan, who hails from Ireland, began playing piano at the age of 5. By his early teens he had realized that the sounds he was hearing from his radio of 70's pop & prog music came from altogether different instruments. It was the start of a quest, which got him to his first synthesizer, a Korg MS-20, in his final years at school.
Whilst studying architecture at Sheffield University during the ‘80’s, many more instruments joined the Korg, including a Mini-Moog.
Eventually, it didn’t take long before Stephan got in touch with the so called 'Sheffield Mafia', and this lead to working with John Dyson en Shaun D'Lear. Over many following years, Stephan became part of Shaun & John's live band. It was also through John Dyson's encouragement that the cd “Map Reference” was recorded and released in 1996.
In 1998, Stephan moved to Ireland, and as work on a second solo album had not come to fruition, he started a collaboration with local Irish musician Keith Corbett, which ended up as the cd “K2Project” in 2000.
Although the album was fairly well received, it also confirmed Stephan's worries that using computer sequencers lead to a particular type of composition which was not quite what he wanted to say.
So he began to acquire an analogue modular system which would help explore programming in the area which the Korg MS-20 & VCS III had initially started him, allowing to play entire gigs of improvised music, rather than playing to backing tapes.
After Steve Jenkins began what have now become the legendary Hampshire Jam concerts in 2001 in the UK , Stephan became the technical manager for the entire series of live events.
As a by-product of the concerts, Stephan began to play improvised music with Steve on the rare occasions they were in the same country. For reasons best known to himself, Steve suggested that the duo open one of his concerts (Hampshire Jam 4, 2005). The improvised music from this set plus some material from the collaborative sessions surfaced on the eponymous “Narcosis” album in 2007.
Stephan will spend the summer of 2009 to record some new music, as he plans to have a new cd for “E-Live 2009”. He’s really looking forward to playing a full set of his music, which will cover some of his other material, as well as an excuse to play “Dr Who” again.
All in all, those who were at “E-Day 2009”, saw what this remarkable musician is capable of: thrived on the challenges of improvisation (musical and technical), he performed an impressive 30-minute solo show as an introduction to the concert of John Dyson & friends.
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