Post #1524284

2026-04-12 17:56 UTC

So, my one possible lead I found led me to what I now think is the answer. I'm about 80% sure I've got the right person, but he is big and famous enough that I think the chances of hearing back from him to confirm this are slight, so I'm going to go ahead and lay it out here. Amin Bhatia. Why? He's Canadian; family came to Canada in the 1970s. Did a lot of early work with synthesizers, attending Bob Moog's school (I think). Released a big synth album, The Interstellar Suite (1987). Wrote a retrospective about synthesizers "Requests from the Vault". But perhaps most importantly, he won the Roland International Synthesizer Competition (in Tokyo) in both 1981 and 1982. I can absolutely see a demo by this guy getting copied floppy disk to floppy disk across Canadian music stores in the 1980s. He's gone on to a big career scoring films and television, winning Gemini and Canadian Screen awards and an Emmy nomination. And he's got personal endorsements from both Steve Porcaro (Toto, session guy) and Oscar Peterson, which is a hell of a thing. I haven't been able to find anything from those competitions online yet - too old to have been documented at the time. I'll keep looking. #AminBhatia #FilmScore #MovieScore #soundtrack #composer #SynthDemo #SynthesizerDemo

Replies (1)

@cazabon@mindly.social 2026-04-12 19:13

Update: I'm now as certain as I can be that I have the right fellow. You can hear it below. It's called "The Answering Machine Song", and he did it in 1988. Apparently a radio station in Calgary (where I believe he was living) played it and told folks they could hear it on Amin's answering machine - and broadcast his home phone number 😆 The full version is on his album "Requests from the Vault". That's on Bandcamp here: https://aminbhatia.bandcamp.com/album/requests-from-the-vault-96k-24bit I believe the demo I heard was a much shorter version that he did actually use as his outgoing message. I haven't found that version anywhere. He talks about it in an interview here: https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2012/10/08/revisiting-the-future-amin-bhatia-the-interstellar-suite/ It's in the liner notes for the album here, as track #4: https://aminbhatia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Requests-from-the-Vault-by-Amin-Bhatia.pdf A 40-year-old mystery, solved. It was fun.

Open ##1524285