Dust - In search of balance

Having thoroughly enjoyed their debut album, we couldn't pass up the chance to fire off a few questions to Dust via email. The answers, penned by singer Andrea D'Addato, reveal the care the band has put into every detail and aspect of their work, and the passion behind it.

You present “Kind” as your recording debut and this new record as your first album. So how do you now look back on everything you did before that? The preparatory work, the attempts to find your own stylistic dimension?

I'd say that's exactly right. Our first self-produced works were mainly aimed at consolidating the chemistry of the group and starting to define an approach to interpreting the songs, while the songwriting was still shaped by the urge to faithfully reproduce the sound of our favourite bands. That said, we still have a lot of affection for those recordings, precisely because they helped us find a collective cohesion that, starting with “Kind”, we began turning into the search for our own stylistic voice.

The most interesting thing about what Dust are now, in my opinion, is the ability to combine the way the National gave darkwave a modern twist with what the Wilco did in a similar way with American classic rock. If you agree with the way I see your music now, feel free to tell me everything you'd like on the subject.

Finding that balance was actually one of the goals we set for ourselves before starting work on the new songs. Certainly, the darkwave tones are more pronounced than on “Kind”, partly to convey through the music the ambiguous, often spectral atmosphere of the lyrics. Taken on their own, references like National and Wilco might be a bit limiting, but they help capture the two faces of this album well: a first half made up essentially of darker, tension-laden songs, which then, starting with the title track, slowly begins to take on some poppier shades.

I find there are a lot of beautiful melodies on this record. How did they come about? Did someone bring a fully formed melodic idea to the others, or did you start from a sketch and work on it together?

For most of the songs, we started from a series of sketches, based on simple guitar riffs or chord progressions and vocal lines with no lyrics yet. Almost all these song skeletons were written by me and Jimbo (Andrea Giambelli), apart from “I'm Not Here”, for which Gabriele wrote the music. Each of us then listened to the sketches individually, working out as many possible arrangements as we could for our own part, so that we could then play them all together and experiment with different solutions. There were many cases where certain arrangement ideas ended up giving a song its identity after the fact, like “Cinema Pt.1”, where Muddy's stark, percussive tempo and Riccardo's rhythm defined a sonic world that everyone else then adapted their parts to fit.

Besides the beautiful melodies, it's obviously important to have a sound that serves them well, and here I think there's further progress compared to “Kind”, where you'd already improved a lot on that front. Again, feel free to tell me everything you'd like on the subject.

With “On The Go” we started out with a much clearer idea of the sound than in the past, because the new songs didn't just need arrangements that gave them the right drive - to come across at their best, they also needed a sonic dress that could help tell their stories. So we chose to scale back the epic quality and the wall of sound of “Kind” in favour of a more shadowy, restrained interpretation. The new songs feel more essential, to convey a sense of imploded emotional tension; perhaps the decisive changes can be found in the guitars, which are more enveloping and less aggressive, and in a drier drum sound, while the reverb on the vocals and the synth bed, which constantly fades in and out, help create an almost spectral sheen. On this front, we have to mention the contribution of Simone Sproccati on production, who gave us a huge hand in giving character and coherence to the overall sound.

Paying closer attention to the lyrics, I noticed a general mood built around uncertainty, around the desire to find your own path and your own place in the world. Is that actually the case?

Yes, let's say it's an uncertainty tied first of all to the identity of the protagonists in the lyrics and the spaces they move through. The lyrics, like the music, have been put through a process of subtraction, and often depict two unidentified individuals (maybe lovers, maybe friends, or even siblings) inhabiting a space with no concrete points of reference. These undefined figures, who seem to drift through the songs like ghosts, are a snapshot of an ambiguous, dissolved intimacy that is nonetheless necessary. As you rightly pointed out, "finding one's own place in the world" is a recurring theme, which translates first and foremost into leaving a trace of oneself in the other, into creating a sense of complicity.

Speaking of lyrics, I can't avoid asking about the track in Italian on the record. Could you explain to our readers what your relationship with the Italian language has been like over the last two years?

Our relationship with writing in Italian is actually quite fraught. We've always been particularly fascinated by the idea of what Dust might sound like in Italian, so much so that over the past two years we wrote a few songs in our own language. After playing those songs live, though, we realized they didn't quite feel like a perfect fit for us, perhaps because Dust's music has always thrived on the contrast between the emotional charge of the performance and a certain detachment made possible by the English language. Even so, we decided to include "Nell'Aria" on the record, an almost entirely instrumental song in which the few sung words are in Italian, because we needed a track that would loosen up the pace while still being unsettling. That way, the return to the starting point marked by the following track, "Cinema Pt.2", would feel even more intense.

In my view, this record has the ability to grab the listener right away, but it also demands real attention to fully grasp all its nuances - in other words, it doesn't seem built for the almost binge-and-discard attitude of most listeners today. Are you at all worried that people might listen to it a couple of times and then set it aside, not because they don't like it but because it demands too much time and effort? Don't tell me it's not something that concerns you - you can hear the enormous amount of work that went into it, so I'd never believe you if you said you made it only for yourselves.

Sure, this shift came out of our own need to try new solutions for the Dust sound, but making a record only for ourselves would be an ungrateful thing to do toward the people who listen to us. We're more than aware that "On The Go" will take a bit of time before it draws the listener in, and that it doesn't suit the disposable, use-and-throw-away attitude of contemporary music. That said, we also have full trust in our listeners, and we believe that, thanks in part to the choice of singles and their videos and to the way the new songs will be performed live, "On The Go" can win over even those who at first wonder what happened to the wall of sound of "Kind".

I'd expect the live sound to stay pretty faithful to the record - is that the case?

Playing live is probably the setting where we feel most at ease, and it lets us express the atmospheres created during the recordings even more intensely. The studio work, especially in terms of sound, is the foundation the whole concert experience rests on, but our live approach is always fairly interpretive, leaving room in almost every song for improvised parts. The arrangements are constantly evolving, and it's rare for a song heard at one show to sound exactly the same as it did the time before.

At least two of you are also part of other projects, and in the past you've never shied away from collaborating with other bands. How important is it to engage with other contexts and other musicians? Do you think that's something you only need during a "growth" phase, or do you feel you never stop learning from others even once you've "made it"? Assuming, of course, that you feel you've made it.

I think believing you've "made it" is one of the most damaging thoughts that can take root in a musician's - or any creative person's - mind. The best thing about making music is precisely the urge to surprise yourself before you even try to surprise the audience, and constantly questioning yourself is essential to pulling that off. Right now, four out of six members of Dust are involved in side projects, precisely out of the need to engage with other realities and put themselves on the line - in fact, both Donnie Lybra and Red Roosters move quite far from Dust, especially in terms of songwriting. These experiences inevitably lead to small cross-contaminations in our own arrangements too - just consider that some of the keyboard parts on "On The Go" were arranged and played by Roberto Redondi of Donnie Lybra; before working with him, we would never have even remotely considered a synth arrangement like the one on "If I Die".

I've been following Italian music for a long time, and it seems to me that there's never been as much ferment as there is now in the northern outskirts of Milan and in the part of Brianza closest to the city. Is that actually the case, or has it always been there and it's only now coming more to light?

Over the years, we've had the chance to hear a lot of really strong projects coming out of the province north of Milan and from Brianza, and with some of these bands we've also built a friendship that goes beyond mere admiration. What we've noticed over all this time is that the music coming out of the provinces isn't necessarily better, but it is more distinctive than that of "city" projects, probably also because of the distance from some of the more worldly, trend-driven dynamics of the indie scene in the big metropolitan areas.

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