Biography
Amin Bhatia’s fascination with both music and electronics won him international fame in his youth. After winning the Roland International Synthesizer competition two years in a row, the resulting exposure launched Bhatia’s music career. It led to projects with David Foster (“The Best of Me”), Steve Porcaro (Toto’s fifth album “Fahrenheit”), and a synth-orchestral solo album on Capitol records’ Cinema label titled “The Interstellar Suite“.Early synthesizers could only play one note at a time so in order to simulate and record an orchestra properly Bhatia was forced to learn how each individual instrument worked. He now uses real players and instruments in his writing, but his days with a Roland sequencer and a Minimoog have given him an unusual insight into the subtleties of arranging and orchestration. Amin’s approach has been likened to the harmonic inventiveness of Jerry Goldsmith and the technical prowess of Hans Zimmer.
For “The Interstellar Suite” Amin combined and layered hundreds of analog electronics to achieve a warm orchestral sound rather than join the trend of sampling and abusing orchestral phrases. To this day he still gets requests from listeners and programmers asking for the sample libraries used. He has a hard time convincing them that it was all him.
The success of the “Suite” was marred by the sudden closing of the Cinema label. Thanks to Internet requests, industry support and much legal wrangling Bhatia has finally been able to re-release the album (www.interstellarsuite.com).
Over the last twenty years Amin has accomplished a sizable profile of film and television scores. They include music for the IMAX feature “Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees”, the Nelvana action adventure “Rescue Heroes: The Movie” and the GFT feature “Going Back” all recorded by actual orchestras. Other projects include “John Woo’s Once A Thief” (which garnered two Gemini nominations for music) “Iron Eagle II” , music for the Olympic Games and for Benson and Hedges Symphony of Fire. He has a large profile of scores for animated series for Nelvana, and Decode, and Disney’s animated series Get Ed co-written with Ari Posner received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Theme. In between these assignments his next solo album is nearing completion.
An active member on the boards for both the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and the Guild of Canadian Film Composers , Amin spends the balance of his time writing scores, playing with his children, fighting with computer upgrades, and dreaming about music.
Ismailimail 