Chris Douglas, embodied at various times as O.S.T., Rook Vallard(e), and Dalglish on imprints ranging from Dimitri Fergadis' Phthalo to Simballrec, Plug Research, Diskono, Worm Interface, and Emanate, works in sound parameters lying outside established electronic and dance music paradigms - the emasculated noisepunk of laptop glitch, the cleanroom-stale micro patterns of tech-house and minimal techno - to uncover the uncomfortable, the confrontation.

Douglas left San Francisco after years in boarding school, at the age of sixteen, for Detroit and then New York to find creative freedom outside the classical piano and keyboard lessons of his childhood - only to return to San Francisco after pleasantly crossing paths with Richie Hawtin and Mad Mike of fabled UR Records. It was after this that O.S.T. began to bear fruit, where Douglas' long standing love of rave charted a path of experimenting with dance music samples in the early ninties that led to Systematic Desensitization as Rook Valard on Phthalo in 1998 and Detect as O.S.T. a year later. Both releases were the work of a more mature Douglas - the first O.S.T. EP appeared on Switch Records in 1993 - but these were the first to see Douglas enter the critical domain.

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