Urban Impressionism: an interview with pianist and composer Dardust
Classical pianist. The job title implies fancy dress, formal performances, and a whiff of stuffiness in the minds of most non-classical lovers. None of these images describe Dario Faini—aka Dardust—an internationally famous, classically trained pianist who drew inspiration from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust to blend all styles of music with classical piano. He stages his multimedia performances like rock shows. He composes and produces award-winning songs, composes marketing campaigns for internationally known luxury brands such as Krug, Vanity Fair, and Maserati, and has released multiple critically acclaimed albums as a pianist/composer.
With a resume like this, it’s tempting to assume that beautiful pianism would be discarded in favor of flash. In reality, Dario Farini is a gifted, sensitive pianist with shimmering technique who has found a way to create dramatic music without crossing over into crass sensationalism. His latest album, Urban Impressions, is an example of his ability to bring out the best of the piano through his playing, elegant recording techniques, and tasteful electronics. This music stretches across time, with homage paid to Romantic and Impressionistic composers, as well as edgy, modern sounds. I’m honored to feature Dardust and this album on No Dead Guys.
I understand that when you were a child you entered the music conservatory in your hometown of Ascoli Piceno, Italy to study classical piano, but that you credit your discovery of David Bowie’s music as your true musical awakening. What is it about David Bowie that had such a profound effect on you?
When I was 9 years old I came across this music magazine with a Ziggy Stardust picture on the cover. I was totally bewitched by this guy with red hair and different coloured eyes. Then I watched Labyrinth at the movies and I fell in love with the soundtrack. So I asked my parents to buy me all his records. This was my gateway to something unconventional, edgy, difficult to understand by a child but led me to open and build my music visions.
When did you first begin composing your own music and what kinds of pieces did you write?
When I was in primary school I began to attend classical piano classes at the Conservatoire, and with my best friend I tried to compose my first pieces, which were surely a little bit naive, with simple chords, but I think that behind them, there was a sparkle of something really emotional. It was a way to color my two-dimensional reality because of the poor creative environment where I was growing up, and the piano was the perfect way to add the third dimension or to build an augmented reality.
I read that you studied psychology when you attended university. In what way does that shape your approach to music?
When I graduated I presented my thesis in "Psychology in music listening" where I tried to underline the processes hidden behind the process of listening. I was focused on the expectations that are activated when you listen to music and how they can be totally disattended by the composers, who take the listeners in a different emotional direction. This gave me a giant lens that I've been using since I began as a professional musician to shape my music with a bigger knowledge.
Congratulations on building an international career, not only as a pianist and a composer but also an award winning producer. When did you first begin working as a producer and how did you break into the field?
While simultaneously pursuing my classical piano studies, I began exploring the pop song form and wrote numerous songs. One of these songs caught the attention of Universal Music Publishing Ricordi, leading to my first contract with them. A few years later, I became a successful songwriter. When I presented my songs to artists and labels, my demos were often well-produced. However, it frequently happened that when an artist decided to perform one of my songs, the producers assigned to the track delivered a less favorable production. Tommaso Paradiso, the leader of a famous Italian band I was collaborating with, was the first to say, “Enough with giving your songs to other producers—you have to produce my next single yourself.” That was the turning point in my journey as a producer.
You’ve had numerous successes as a composer and producer, most notably “Soldi,” which won 2nd place in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2019 and went on to become a hit in Europe. What has finding this kind of success given you and what did it take away?
“Soldi” was a success, especially in Italy, where I came to the public attention as a producer as well as a songwriter. This was good for me but at the same time took away the attention of the audience from my work of modern classical composer.
One of the many things that impresses me about your work is how fearlessly you cross musical genres and combine elegant piano playing with tasteful electronic effects. When did you first begin doing this and what inspired you to do so?
My first experiences with music were in classical music but during my teenage years, I started to explore the world of electronic music with my first synthesizers, and I began to create different soundscapes. I translated my feeling of isolation and alienation into my music, bridging the gap between classical piano and electronic music. It’s a very unconscious process, without any cognitive mediation. Ten years ago when I began my musical path as Dardust, I naturally tried to merge my two creative interests in music. This was totally natural because they were the two musical worlds I grew up in.
Congratulations on the release of your latest album, Urban Impressionism. You’ve stated that you “aimed to create an album with urban and dreamlike atmospheres…” Would you be willing to share more about this?
Modern classical repertoire is often associated, both visually and in terms of mood, with nature—something calm, meant to be listened to in the background, almost like “furniture music,” as Erik Satie described it, or worse, something akin to new age. But our focus is entirely grounded in the urban environment. Urban music represents the latest revolution in music history, and my aim was to bring the colors of the piano, like an impressionist painter, to the black and white of the outskirts. The shaded, dreamlike atmospheres created by impressionist painters and composers were my inspiration, but I wanted to translate them into the urban landscape. As reflected in the album's visuals, brutalist buildings have been graphically transformed to evoke a new concept of dreamy, blended, foggy, and surreal suburbs.
I enjoyed every track of Urban Impressionism, but my favorite is “Le Bolero Brutal,” an homage to the music of Steve Reich which employs a multi-effect device called “The Godfather.” What is The Godfather and how did you use it in this piece?
The "Godfather" is a multi-effect device created by an Italian team. This is the first recording ever made using The Godfather. It’s a tool that allows you to create different patterns and rhythmic figures by using pedals to record live, short sections of piano recordings, arpeggios, chords, and progressions. It enables the creation of unexpected textures, enhances creativity, and encourages lateral thinking in the creative process.
Another favorite is the lovely impressionistic “Urban Impressionism” which brims with energy and life. What can you tell us about your inspirations for this piece?
“Urban Impressionism” is the title track and it's a time lapse of my dreamy impression of the town and the suburbs. I'm trying to convey a feeling of anticipation and awakening. It's where everything starts, the beginning of this musical voyage where impressionist piano colors dovetail with electronic urban sounds. It's my homage to Debussy—listen out also for a quote from Liszt's “Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa D'este” which is a piece that I've been studying for the past two years and is one of my favorites. Instead of seeing the water spouting from the fountains in my track I see the frenetic flow of traffic, the geometrical lines of the brutalist buildings, the skyline and all the perspectives that anticipate the mood of the record.
Urban Impressionism was released in November, 2024. How has the response been to it thus far?
As of today, I can share feedback from my local audience—they love the album! I've received some of the best compliments on my work ever, and I’m truly grateful for that. I hope the European tour will allow people abroad to appreciate the album just as much.
I understand that Urban Impressionism will go on tour in March 2025, with 10 stops in European cities. Will you be staging and performing it like your past performances with lights, smoke effects, and piles of electronics?
Not at all! The upcoming concerts abroad will be very minimal. The music from my piano and electronic gear will be the only “colors” of the next shows. The entire light design will be white, with no additional colors. After the “Duality Tour,” which represented the peak in terms of visuals, vibrant colors, and light design effects, I wanted to start again from zero. This is a rebirth for me.
Other than your upcoming tour, what current and future plans are you most excited about?
I have other unreleased tracks from the Urban Impressionism album to share with the audience, as well as the piano solo versions of the same album. Additionally, I’ll be releasing the original soundtrack for Mani Nude, a beautiful film set to premiere in March. So, there’s a lot of music to share with the world! My plan is to play live as much as possible, because for me, the ultimate goal of being a musician is to share my music in a live setting, creating unique and unforgettable experiences for the audience.
What advice can you give young musicians seeking to create a career for themselves in music?
Don't pay attention to the world of playlists, they are a cage in terms of creativity. Be courageous, explore your visions and try to create something unique, diverse and authentic.
For the past decade Italian songwriter-producer Dario Faini has been on a mission to keep us on the edge of our seats with the chameleon-like sound of his solo-project Dardust (portmanteau of Dario and Stardust). Consisting of 6 albums, 500 million streams, epic stage shows with 50-piece orchestras, sync-deals with Apple and Hyundai, and commissions with luxury brands such as Krug, Vanity Fair, and Maserati, his body of work merging neo-classical piano with contemporary electronica is a secret rendezvous between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Moby in a parallel universe. His latest album ‘Urban Impressionism’ is out on 8 November via Artist First / Sony Music Masterworks.
Born and bred in a small village of Ascoli Piceno in the eastern region of Marche, Dardust’s childhood was pervaded by one particular emotion. “I grew up with this feeling of alienation, totally like an outsider,” he describes. “So, I tried to compensate for this alienation by colouring my reality with music and imagining a lot of things happening outside in this world.” Inspired by his older sister, piano lessons became Dardust’s first musical outlet. “I began to study classical piano with this old fashioned teacher who was very strict, very disciplined.” A few years later Dardust entered the conservatory where he studied classical piano for the next 8 years.
It was around this time when Dardust found his kindred spirit. “I stumbled across an image of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in a music magazine, this kind of alien with red hair and different coloured eyes,” he exclaims. “I was totally bewitched by him.” What this encounter led to was more than just the discovery of Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, though. “David Bowie represented the door to electronic artists like Brian Eno, Chemical Brothers, Kraftwerk, and Underworld. My roots are there.”
After his father bought him Novation Bass Station, Dardust gained freedom to move between two worlds: the one of demanding classical piano repertoire, and the other one of minimal sound of single chords. This sense of liberation is evident on Dardust’s album ‘7’ (2015), a life-affirming debut where Yann Tiersen-style piano arpeggios, Renaissance-era rolling basslines, and symphonic post-rock swells akin to Sigur Rós make an aesthetically coherent and pleasing whole.
Inspired by his degree in psychology and the theory of musical listening, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats soon became Dardust’s mission in music. “I was always fascinated by the expectations that you can create musically – and that you can absolutely not fulfil them,” he states. “It creates a lot of different colours and elements of surprise.” Introducing an element of danger into his music had a major appeal to Dardust. “To enter a new zone and feel you’re in danger – this is the perfect place to be, this is exactly what I want to create with my music every time.”
This danger zone with its sudden seismic moments extended from Dardust’s music to his personal life in tragic ways. In 2018 his home was reduced to rubble after being hit by an earthquake. “It was the place of my teenage life, the place of my childhood, so to see all my past crumbling, the cradle of my imagination of my creativity was totally lost in that moment, it made me feel like I was without a shelter, without anything.”
The aftershock that followed Dardust’s majestic sophomore record ‘Storm and Drugs’ (2018) was infinitely worse. ”Around the same time I lost my father. ‘Storm and Drugs’ was at the start of his illness,” he says gently. “It was the beginning of a very dark period.”
That Dardust’s life experiences have made his music so visceral and immediate comes as no surprise. “On every album, there is a cathartic aspect,” he points out. “It’s designed to get you into a very dark zone where you can experience the grief of losing everything, being in a storm without a shelter,” he explains. “But at the same time in every piece I’ve written there is a luminous horizon of hope. Because we have to survive.”
The cathartic quality is created with stark musical contrasts, one of Dardust’s trademark. Take ‘Duality’ (2022), a mercurial album divided in two distinct halves: the first one of vocoder-driven Italo-Disco, soulful UK Garage, and dirty French House followed by introspective pieces on solo piano, an artistic statement revealing Dardust’s resistance to labels. “I don’t like to be put in a box. I don’t want to be pure in music,” he states. “I’m always looking for something that surprises me. I want to explore different worlds.”
Dardust’s take on collaborations follows the same logic. “The biggest challenge is to do something disruptive,” he encapsulates his approach. ”When I worked with the French rapper Stromae for Notte della Taranta, I wanted to introduce him to pizzica [Puglian folk music]. It was something totally new for him, and for me too.”
Exactly how versatile an artist Dardust is becomes obvious when reading through his long list of projects ranging from commissions for luxury brands such as Krug, Vanity Fair, and Maserati to collaborations with high-profile artists – Benny Benassi, Mahmood, Sophie and the Giants, to name a few – not to mention film scores. The latest of them, ‘Mani Nude’, will be screened at the 19th Rome Festival on 23 October. “I was exploring a lot of new sounds with Minimoog and Moog One, merging analogue and digital with the world of contemporary classical and Bulgarian music. It was really intense work.”
These collaborations have made Dardust one of the most successful producers in Italy, yet another unexpected event in his life, “a beautiful accident”, as he calls it. “I didn’t want to become like this. I wanted to explore my music.” Fame and fortune did come with a big price tag, however. “I had this big burnout because I felt a lot of pressure coming from everyone who wanted to work with me. But at a certain point of my career as a producer I said: No. Stop.”
Learning to set better boundaries and exercising restraint in his life go a long way in explaining why Dardust thinks his upcoming album ‘Urban Impressionism’ “could be a sign of maturity”. Entirely void of contrasts and danger, Dardust’s ascetic yet picturesque piano-driven album with careful use of electronics is reminiscent of some of the most memorable moments by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Toshifumi Hinata.
A paean for wanderlust inspired by the Brutalist architecture of Parisian bleak suburbs, written in the Latin Quarter and Germano Studios in New York, travelling played a pivotal role during his creative process. Dardust compares it to a psychological phenomenon between a client and a psychotherapist known as transference. “Every place where I decide to go, it’s something very inspirational because of the history of the place,” he says. “You can project your inner world onto this new place and that place will project back a new perspective.”
Much like his childhood idol, Dardust drew his creative power for ‘Urban Expressionism’ from the entire universe. Prior to the process, he was advised by his astrologer that a solar return could have a potentially disastrous impact. “He told me Saturn is against me,” he recalls. “And because of that, I could have two very bad years ahead of me.” In order to mitigate this, Dardust scheduled additional stays in Quebec and New York to work on the album.
What the future has in store for this man, no one knows. We can only wait in anticipation – and awe.