Dardust: the new album is “Urban Impressionism”
With a decades-long career, Dardust is a pianist, producer and composer among the most influential and awarded, creator of a personal style capable of redrawing the boundaries of classic and contemporary, throwing his music far beyond definitions and always creating unconventional atmospheres in a perfect balance between piano and electronics. ExitNovember 8 his new recording project, “Urban Impressionism”a work on the piano in which he explores new combinations of sounds and contrasts to increase their vividness, already anticipated by the songs “Mon coeur”, “Béton Brut”“Impression”, “Skyline”, “Italian Rêverie”, “Danse (en plein air)”, “Nocturne of You”. After the geographical axis Berlin, Reykjavík and London, which crossed the first three discs (“7″, “Birth”, “SAD Storm and Drugs”) and then arriving at “Duality” (2022), the Japan-inspired album with which he outlined his two sonic hemispheres, poised between reason and feeling, between instrumental chamber music and club electronics, “Urban Impressionism”, his fifth studio album, represents a true synthesis capable of recomposing his dichotomies.
Dardust returns to once again challenge the conventions of neoclassical/contemporary music and he does it, as usual, breaking down the boundaries between the arts, combining music and architectureharmonizing contrasts but starting from new sources of inspiration. On the one hand, the architectural geometries of urban suburbs, from brutalism to post-modernism, which in music translate into genuine expressions, forged without resorting to embellishments or productive artifices; on the other, the rapid brushstrokes of pictorial impressionism, which are reflected in his approach to composition. Dardust explores new urban scenarios through travel and sound recordings in the suburbs of different cities and he does so by taking as a model the Impressionists’ ability to paint scenes of modern outdoor life by representing reality in a subjective way and emphasizing personal and immediate perception rather than the precision of details.
“It all started from an analysis of the compositional structures of Brian Eno, Debussy and Steve Reich. From there I found my own “minimal” language, in which the piano continues to play a central role – he says Dardust: – I tried to create an album with an urban and dreamlike atmosphere, crossed by the analogue sounds of the Moog One, Juno 66 and Take5 synthesizers, the repetitions of the Godfather and by samples recorded in the urban spaces of Paris, New York and London. I liked the idea of coloring the black and white of our emotional zones like an impressionist painter. The suburbs that dress in new colors are nothing more than “the non-places” of our multifaceted emotional sphere left aside, our traumas, our wounds. Vulnerabilities that must be explored and investigated without fear, to acquire a renewed luminosity and shape a better version of ourselves.”
Dardust as a producer he boasts two victories at the Sanremo Festival and a list of 100 platinum records. The Tour”Urban Impressionism” will kick off March 18, 2025and will cross the stages of 9 European citiesstarting from Barcelona and then continuing to Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Brussels, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, London. The tour is produced by Metatron, A1 Concerts, ITB International Talent Booking.
