Vienna-based Dino Spiluttini approaches contemporary electronic music with pointed emotional dynamics. His work often displays an anxious or brooding yearning for fulfilment and respite from troubled embodiment, frustrated identity, or worldly unease. Since 2019’s Editions Mego release Heaven, which contemplated death, reunion and bodily perfection with choirs, organs, harps and pads, Spiluttini has focussed on a lusher and more tempered approach drawn towards trance euphoria. Using virtual instruments and a small modular system, his largely beatless music now pulls together computer music aesthetics and R‘n‘B acapellas with increasingly meticulous production.
First time I’ve seen you play was around 10+ years ago in a small venue in Vienna. As far as I remember, you had an analogue “sound”, and musically, it was something quite different to what you’re now – perhaps more noisy, less “clean”?. Can you talk about your “musical evolution”?
This was right at the beginning of my path as a purely electronic musician. I had been making music for over a decade before that, but mostly in bands (Liger – Split Yourself Lilith /THEY SHOOT MUSIC) or generally more vocals-focused projects.
I started making ambient music in 2013/14 because writing songs hadn’t been fun for a long time and out of frustration I was looking for a radically different musical outlet.
Funnily enough this new music immediately became more successful than anything I had ever done before. The ambient underground scene is (or was) rather small back then, and I quickly rose to a level of acclaim where labels kept asking me for music and my releases generally sold out fairly quickly. And all of this without any real effort, which was a completely new experience for me as a person who generally suffers from overthinking and second-guessing everything.
At the same time my habit of self-sabotaging kicked in and I realised that everything had become too easy and I needed to change things up again. So after two and a half LPs and a bunch of tape releases I decided to explore different musical styles. Another reason I needed a change was that making this overly depressive and self-concerned nihilist drone music had started to affect my mental health a little too much. I’m fairly certain that wallowing in my own misery all the time kept me from getting better.
The first result of my experiments with extending my sonic palette was my album, Heaven, which introduced a more concrete and focused and linear approach to composition and arrangement. Eventually I ended up where I am now, juxtaposing my melancholic roots with the euphoria of rave, which for some reason seems to be working out well for me so far, in terms of both creative satisfaction and the response from my listeners.
Your Editions Mego release Heaven contemplated death, reunion and bodily perfection. Can you talk about this release?
I guess in a way this was my attempt at making a concept album. The main background story was an experience I had with my mother about eight or so years ago, where she led me to her town’s church and showed me two urns. Turns out she had already reserved spots for her and my remains. She never understood the impact this had on me, and I’m not sure I understand it either, but in a way it shook me up a bit and made me contemplate death even more than before. Her death. My own death. And with that comes an unavoidable contemplation of life, life goals, failures, you name it. It opened a can of worms that was already looming in the back of my head.
Now the question is, how can instrumental music be “about” something? And I have no real answer for that. All I can say is that I made all the music on the album while having these dark thoughts, because that was generally what I was thinking back then anyway. The album art features pictures of me as a baby and of my mother as a young girl, for extra emo points.
How important are the emotional aspects of music and music-making to you?
I think generally speaking there are two ways one can make art: use it as a means to express and evoke emotions, or make the recipient question their perspective on the world. The latter can be mainly found in academia and research, but it’s definitely bleeding through into club culture for example as well. I however have always found myself on the emo side of things, both as a creator and a consumer of art. I guess we all go through this phase in our youth where we’re mostly affected by things that shake us emotionally, be it extremely sad music or transgressive films, and I just never grew out of this. I’ve learned at a young age that creating something that resonates with me on an emotional level almost has a transcendental quality to me. It sounds cheesy as hell, but as someone who’s always derived their self worth mostly through their creative output, it has the ability to make me feel like I belong on this earth.
Besides producing music, you are also active in a studio as a mastering engineer. How does this influence your creative output?
Working in a mastering-grade monitoring environment has had a massive impact in the way I work with sound. Thinking about it, I’m sure this is another reason why my production style has changed from the blurry nihilist ambient I used to make to the more distinct and focused production work I’m doing now.
How would you evaluate the music you receive for mastering? There was a lot of talk about overuse of compression and volume in production of late – would you say this is the case? Do you see any “trend” in production?
I’m working with clients from all genres and beyond, and everyone is using dynamics differently. If anything, people have started telling me to keep their tracks more dynamic at the cost of lower loudness more often recently. The so-called loudness war has been going on for around 30 years now, and I think we’re generally currently seeing the tail end of it. Even club music is becoming more dynamic, I think. There are however genres that inherently carry crushed dynamics as one of their main characteristics, like festival EDM or whatever, but nowadays we have the tools to do this without sacrificing too much. I for one don’t care. Overcompression can be great in my opinion. The music tells me what it needs, and if it doesn’t, the client will.
You are based in Vienna. How is the Viennese underground scene at the moment?
I don’t have my finger on the pulse as closely as I used to 15 years or so ago, but I feel it’s constantly shifting. When I was in my active clubbing phase, there was no real underground/leftfield electronic music scene. It was mainly electroclash and new rave parties, while the “experimental” indie rock scene was blooming.
In recent years this has changed massively. The so-called democratisation of music production has led to a massive wave of new creative people flooding the scenes; everyone is a producer or dj nowadays. This probably just comes with living in a big city. Thankfully we have promoters like Struma & Iodine, who regularly separate the wheat from the chaff for us, and labels like Ashida Park and Ventil doing the heavy lifting in terms of adventurous electronic music releases.
The main problem the scene is facing these days is the slow death of most of the great live venues. By this I mean both the actual vanishing venues as well as the overcommercialisation of others. This affects all music scenes here. I also dabble in the hardcore and metal scenes, and they’ve probably been hit harder by this than the electronic music underground, because it’s easier to deploy a temporary off space for a laptop artist than a venue for a full band.
What are your current projects?
I just scrapped two years worth of material because I came to the realisation that I was heading down the wrong path. As I mentioned above, I need to emotionally resonate 100% with my creative practice, and I had to admit that with the more recent material my heart wasn’t in it enough. Funnily enough this realisation occurred during the SHAPE+ meet-up in Prague this year. Something about being surrounded by all these great artists made me think about what it is that makes me special, and I eventually understood that I have to make singing an integral part of my music again. So this is the main thing I’ve been working on.
The other current project is building a new closed system for my music production. I’ve learned that in order to be productive, I need to drastically limit my possibilities. For example, my last EP Death Chants II was made mostly using a Roland JP-8080 synthesizer and r’n’b. The new iteration of this system will be a little more elaborate, and I think it’s almost ready..
Interview Lucia Udvardyova
Photo Tina Bauer