Duality

Description

For the very first time, Dardust presents the two halves of his musical soul, the acoustic and the electronic, which he distinguishes from each other on his new project DUALITY.
DUALITY is the latest album from alternative classical music pioneer Dardust, a true star of music production in Italy, where he has accumulated over 60 platinum records to his name.
This double album comprises a total of 20 tracks available on CD and vinyl.
While on previous albums, Dardust added electronic sounds to his minimalist piano compositions, creating a genre straddling neo-classical and pop, he has here chosen to split his two universes into two parallel but converging experiences, dedicating one side of the record to solo piano and the second to electronic music.
The two sides that make up DUALITY thus represent the two hemispheres of the human brain. The solo piano tracks of the "right hemisphere" express the pure emotion and innocence of contemporary piano virtuosity through music inspired by the natural world and a more emotionally spontaneous sense of improvisation, like that of a poet. His reference points are drawn from East Asian culture: Kabuki theater and Zen Buddhism. The concepts that run through these pieces are linked to a Japanese philosophy illustrated by the sakura, the cherry blossom, which represents fragility, beauty, mortality, and renewal. Together, these ten pieces depict the cyclical nature of life through the seasons and how everything leads not to an epilogue but to a prologue, a continuous feeling of rebirth.
The electronic tracks of the "left hemisphere," on the other hand, symbolize the rational part of our brain, the "engineer" within the artist. They have been shaped with a new sonic geometry linked to patterns, rhythms, synthesizers, and musical universes belonging to different styles, blended to produce a new type of artistic narrative. Each of them has a theme and a riff that gives it its own identity, within which one can hear references to the sound of the 90s, John Carpenter's film scores, the prog rock band Goblin, Italo-Disco, UK garage, and Nu jazz. In this universe of stylistic cross-pollination, the analog approach combines with the digital and the organic, thanks to intros and outros made in collaboration with the Studio Murena collective.