From Bowie to Urban Impressionism: Meet Dardust, Italy's Neoclassical composer

With a remarkable 100-plus platinum records to his name, Dario Faini is a songwriter, pianist, and producer whose music and songs have been heard at the Super Bowl, NBA matches, and the Winter Olympics. On the foundations of working with some of Italy’s top pop acts and having countless songs reach the Eurovision Song Contest finals, he releases his latest solo piano album as Dardust, Urban Impressionism, putting him in league with the likes of Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds.

It’s possible that Dardust is one of the most decorated names you haven’t yet heard of; in 2020, Apple Inc. chose his track Fear from the album S.A.D Storm and Drugs for one of the tech company's famed keynote presentations and product launches at the Steve Jobs Theatre in California. A year later, he performed an under-the-stars concert at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, as well as performing at the 66th Eurovision Song Contest onstage with Benny Benassi and Sophie and The Giants.

As if these weren’t enough huge, culturally significant events, he was then asked to compose new music for the flag handover ceremony during the Olympic flag transition from Beijing 2022 to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Italy, Milan-Cortina 2026. You could be forgiven for wondering why you’d want any distraction from the world of big, glitzy events and rubbing shoulders with pop stars, in the form of brutalist architecture and minimalist piano compositions, but that is just how multi-faceted Dardust is.

He joins the Zoom call wearing an Under Armour sleeveless top that suggests he somehow also found time for a workout on top of everything else he’s doing. “I'm practising all day long, practising piano, and am reviewing my pieces for the next concert that I have,” he says. “It's a very demanding period, but I'm doing my best and I want to do everything perfectly.”

In terms of how the worlds of classical, pop, and electronic music collided for him, Dardust is a musician who, like many before him, had a Bowie awakening in his teenage years.

“When I was nine years old, there was a piano in my home, and my sister was having piano lessons,” he says, “So just to emulate her, I began to study piano. But then I came across this beautiful picture of Ziggy Stardust in a music magazine at school. I’d never seen anything like this. I was 10 years old, and I was totally bewitched by this image. I wanted to go deeper and discover his music. It was a totally different scenario compared to classical studies.

“I began these two different paths in music: classical music, contemporary music, and electronic music. Thanks to David Bowie, I discovered the electronic music world, from Kraftwerk to the ‘90s scene, The Chemical Brothers, and The Prodigy. I grew up with this unconventional musical vision, and at a certain point, I decided to combine these two different worlds.”

The start of his prolific songwriting and producing career began in 2006. “I remember that I was writing songs, and I wanted to investigate the song form. An Italian star, Irene Grandi, was very popular. She's a beautiful singer. She chose one of my songs. I don't know how she received my song, and from that moment on, I signed a contract with Universal Publishing.

“Ten years later, my songs were placed with a lot of publishers in Italy, and a lot of artists wanted to sing my songs. The next step was that Tommaso Paradiso had a big break in Italy in 2016, and he told me that I have to produce the song, and that I didn't have to deliver the song to another producer. From that period on, I became a very successful producer. The big break was with Mahmood, with the Sanrameo Festival and Eurovision.”

Going from one of the most decorated songwriters and producers in Italy to pursuing starkly minimal piano and electronic music depicting brutalist architecture in musical form might leave some scratching their heads, but Dardust is fully committed to exploring this side of his musical psyche. This classical project hasn’t quite met the wild success of his pop career, but the growth is very clear to see: he’s now signed to Sony Masterworks, has seven albums under the Dardust name, and has just completed a European tour. He’s very inspired by his contemporaries, such as Nils Frahm, but has very strong feelings about the Peaceful Piano playlists on Spotify that have come to dominate the genre.

“Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Hania Rani – they inspired me to start this new musical path as a contemporary composer and pianist. But the classical world seems to have become a game of playlists, where some editor decides if your song deserves to be in the playlists or not. If one of your songs is in this playlist, your profile becomes huge because they have millions of streams. But a lot of the songs are fake. Maybe they are made by AI, or they are fake projects. This is not my business. I want to do my vision, I don't want to be distracted by all these things.

“For me, the numbers appearing on the profiles of this platform are a mistake. Because art is not a number. It's totally wrong. Sometimes you have a very important artist who has a 30-year career, and their profile has fewer numbers than a new artist. Because this new artist is placed in a lot of playlists. We don't care about numbers. We care about the vision. We care about art. I think that these numbers have to be totally cancelled from the streaming platforms.”

As Dardust rightly points out, this music scene, dubbed ‘neoclassical’, which started out with such a small cluster of artists such as Frahm making music in such a DIY way, has become strangely dominated by piano streaming playlists. The likes of Arnalds have confirmed their suspicions that Spotify creates fake artist profiles for these playlists, possibly even paying off composers to write tracks for them without receiving royalties. Dardust’s suggestion that AI music will start seeping its way in doesn’t sound unlikely either.

With the neoclassical scene now so congested with said fake artists, but also innumerable composers who mimic the felt piano tracks of some of the artists mentioned without adding much of a new voice to the genre, the wonderful news is that Dardust brings something stunningly new to the table. The opening title track of Urban Impressionism is quite glorious, with the Italian opting for a grand piano (instead of the ubiquitous soft piano sound that has been done to death), showcasing his virtuosic playing skills, while somehow combining his penchant for urban pop production with a sub-bassline. It has no right whatsoever to work, yet it does.

The deluxe version of the album has just been released, and by sheer coincidence, the album’s original release happened to coincide with The Brutalist, the multi-award-winning film in which Adrien Brody plays a tortured brutalist architect. On how architecture inspired the album, Dardust says, “I grew up on the periphery and in the outskirts, and I felt a bit abandoned in that kind of environment. I was far away from the core of the world. I began to use my imagination, to use the colours of the piano to create a magical environment, to bring the colours of the piano into the black and white of the outskirts.

“The brutalist concept was perfect for the album, because brutalist buildings are naked. They are naked without a facade. I like this concept because, for the first time, compared to my producer world, which is made of a lot of layers, in this album I used only my piano and very minimal electronic textures.”

Dardust’s previous album, Duality, took a much less minimalistic approach. It’s almost a dance music album. For this latest LP, he purposefully restricted the tools he was allowed to use for the music. And besides the piano, those tools included a multi-effects channel called The Godfather. “Made by these two guys in Puglia,” he says. “I think that I am the first in Italy to use it. Then I have my Juno-60, my Moog, and that's it, just four elements.”

Modern classical music is often associated with Berlin on account of Frahm, Dustin O’Halloran, Max Richter and many other artists being based there in its early days, and Iceland thanks to the icy textures of Arnalds’ music. In Italy, modern piano music is much more associated with the easy listening of Ludovico Einaudi (one of the most streamed classical artists in the world) and Giovanni Allevi. But Dardust, who has recorded previous solo albums in Berlin and Iceland, is clearly not seeking to be labelled as easy listening, even though some of his piano pieces are wonderfully calming and introspective.

“I want to push the boundaries of contemporary classical,” he says. “I feel very lucky, because in Italy, what I'm doing is very highbrow and niche. Italian music is dominated by urban and pop music. We have Ludovico Einaudi and Giovanni Allevi, and they are very pop, very easy listening. I love them, I'm not judging them. But I want to explore more, and I feel very lucky; it's a miracle what I have been doing in these last 10 years. It wasn't granted at all that I could have my own audience. My next goal is to explore more, to expand my music, and my visions abroad. I’m thinking of moving to London and splitting my time between there and Italy.”

The deluxe edition of Urban Impressionism is out now, and we could all do with music that is somehow equal parts uplifting, calming, and of course, brutal. Surely London’s brutalist masterpiece, the Barbican Centre, which has hosted neoclassical music’s biggest stars, now beckons for Dardust. In the meantime, it will be fascinating to continue witnessing him effortlessly slipping between the worlds of pop music and contemporary classical.

dardustofficial.com