Beginning his songwriter journey in a Woody Guthrie-esque harmonica-and-guitar set-up, DAMARIN has strayed considerably – if Dylan went from acoustic to electric, DAMARIN leaped from acoustic to electronic, confusing many but intriguing some.

His last release takes a few steps back from the misty ethereal Electronica-Downtempo mix of his debut (DAMARIN, 2020) - to dedicate time and space to the preponderance of peculiar grooves and strange Psychedelic sonics that nonetheless add up to a brighter, sunnier sound in his new E.P., “Harpworld”.

DAMARIN started with drums in 2010 – out of frustration with his middle-school band, he started teaching himself guitar - “to write my own stuff and as a better, more compact way to get girls”, as he cordially revealed. The harmonica came around the same time – a random purchase in a second-hand library. Synchronicity made the tiny instrument central to his Songwriting, beginning an unrepentant love for the Blues, which would find its way into his music no matter what genre it would be. He slowly became a jack of all trades – he now plays drums, piano, slide guitar, baritone, resonator, bukkehorn, didgeridoo.

When asked what is his favourite description of his music, DAMARIN quoted a collaborator - "It has a darkness to it". It seems to us that whilst this darkness is more than certainly maintained it becomes brighter after being washed in a sea of reverbs, much like the sound of Heaven to A Tortured Mind (Yves Tumor, 2020) and alluding to The Slow Rush (Tame Impala, 2020) but using DAMARIN’s own pallet of sounds, such as the harmonica, which becomes a unifying sonic element.

DAMARIN comes from a mix of backgrounds – Romanian, but with a mysteriously disappeared Jewish grandfather, Moldovan – and possibly a tint of Russian. Whereas many of his compatriots like to sing in a bland American accent, DAMARIN likes to exaggerate his East European-ness, sounding like the threesome-lovechild of Bauhaus, Laibach and Jim Morrison. He currently exists in a pandemic limbo – having fled back to the motherland in order to shelter and protect his family and deal with personal tragedy and financial decline, he found himself stable and creative in his childhood home, although the experience of London has helped him grow.

His mother is a Romanian actress who has starred in a Cannes-awarded film, his father was an actor before he passed away in 2010. A culture magazine has described his last release in the following terms: “Polyvalent instrumentals, unusual riffs, humour, sarcasm, social vision. Without pretending to decipher all tendencies, schemes and styles, it can be said that DAMARIN’s spirit is struggling in the cage of mundanity. The fury in him will decide when it’ll break, exploding into pure light” (Ungureanu, 2021). When we asked him how this review made him feel, he said that he just cried.

In terms of the Songwriting process, it felt right to begin by asking DAMARIN “why the harmonica?”.

“It breathes. It’s very much like singing. It’s hard to play wrong notes – it’s even harder to play the really right ones. But you blow and you draw – it’s the only instrument where you produce sound by breathing. Becky Jones told me that, for better or worse, it has become my sort of trademark. I never intended this – which is why there’s only one harmonica track on my debut album. But here it felt right to dedicate the entire EP to it and yet juxtapose it in an unexpected context”.

DAMARIN draws a lot from the techniques of his predecessors. He claims to have dreamt Bowie right before he died – waking up to the sad news. The dream was cryptic – DAMARIN kept asking questions, Bowie waved them away and instead inquired about him and his musician friends present in the dream. It invested the artist with a feeling of generational responsibility – whether or not he would achieve success, it was clear that the duty of the youth was carrying the torch forward.  

Thus, DAMARIN makes heavy use of Stream-of-Consciousness - according to Astor and Negus (2014, p. 8) both the nonsense verse of Lear and the sound poetry of Tzara are its predecessors, although it seems to truly originate in the psychology of William Jones. DAMARIN takes a deep breath and creates the arrangements with little patience or care when it comes to following convention – instead, he tries to satiate pulsations of his subconscious. “Think less – create more”. For both his debut and this release, DAMARIN wrote no lyrics – he simply sat in front of the microphone and recorded whatever came off the top of his head.

“I used this heavily on ‘Have Me’. As soon as I had the instrumental, I closed my eyes and recorded the vocals in one take. I probably couldn’t do it again in the same way.”

He sometimes makes heavy use of Method Acting – “better to be artistically real than musically correct”, he stated – whatever archetype is right for the song, he feels that he must fully enter that mindset. David Bowie talked about how he would create characters and write from their perspectives, something which made the process much easier (Blank on Blank, 2014). DAMARIN told us that it was easy to adopt this outlook, having been born in a family of actors. The second track, “Existential Cowboy”, had both himself and collaborator Chet immersing themselves in a “post-Western fantasy”, exchanging existential musings under a starry sky.

In London, he found himself learning about Cut-Up. William Burroughs (1961, p. 2) tells us about how the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara went to a rally in the 1920s and proposed to write a poem by pulling words out of a hat. DAMARIN found instantaneous use. This strategy was employed on the track “Mary Jane”, where he cut-up sections of different poems he had written before into what has become an obvious Psychedelic hymn to marijuana. DAMARIN simply pressed record in his DAW, he stepped into his makeshift vocal booth and then he started frantically scrolling through poems written in his phone’s Notes App, singing parts that seemed right from different pieces of text – no actual physical paper was harmed in the process.

Production wise, he stays true to experimental methods but he isn’t worried about delegating. He often goes for Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards to make production decisions. Oblique Strategies are a way of allowing hazard (or fate) to generate ideas, breaking creative blocks (Popova, 2014). On the track “Have Me”, DAMARIN found himself anxious with the dirty vocal tracks, metronomes and outdoors sounds being heard in the isolated stems. He drew an Oblique Strategies card – “change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency” – instead of redoing the vocals, he kept processing them heavily with layers of reverb, delays and compressors – the unusual plug-in chain was born out of this card.

In the same spirit, DAMARIN enjoys sending his projects to fellow collaborators to “spice it up” and take it in unusual directions. He then takes the material others have sent and employs cut-up once again – on Mary Jane, for instance, the two tracks sent by collaborator Hazel Smith were cut-up. She sent a high melody as well as an arabesque, a chanting style resembling Muslim trance singing – the chant was cut-up and repositioned to add even more layers of weirdness.

“Do you feel that you must work with others to create interesting art?”

“No, not necessarily. But from personal experience, when a musical product goes through multiple hands, the layers of meaning grow and it evolves”.

Technology wise, he makes heavy use of his Ableton Push - “totally revolutionised my workflow – it’s an instrument in itself and also a massive cheat sheet”. The Push allows the artist to change the key and the scale at any time with a push of a button – he can thus jump from Hungarian Harmonic Minor to Lydian in a second without thinking - it has brought him more freedom and he sees it as an expression of “the musical symbiosis of man and machine”.

He sometimes works in destructive ways, breaking sounds apart with plug-in chains. A piano becomes a new kick drum – an ethereal synth becomes a new set of strings. This is inspired from Jon Hopkins’s workflow (Hrishikesh, 2018). The bass part on “Mary Jane” was born out of an earlier MIDI drum track which was eventually phased out entirely in favour of the bassline.

One of his production techniques is an adaptation of Kevin Parker’s technique for figuring out vocal parts (Hrishikesh, 2020) – the psych-rock star talked about how he plays a loop for hours or even days until finally he hears the part clearly in his head. Creative mixing isn’t the most intuitive part for DAMARIN – so he saturates his mind with snippets of music until finally he sees a production path.

 “Yes, it drives my neighbours insane, but my family got used to it”.

While the lockdown has enabled DAMARIN creatively by giving him time, it has limited him in terms of resources. It seems that some of the electronic instruments used could have been acoustically recorded for more flavour – there is only so much one can do from a home studio, even if there is a constant back-and-forth stream between collaborators.  To circumvent this problem, a tape plugin was used in the master fader for “Existential Cowboy” to compensate for the electronic dominion and create a more acoustic sound. DAMARIN nonetheless agrees with the criticism that the album could have used more acoustic nuance – and can only sigh in response.

“We’ve all tried our best, haven’t we? Any genre, any world. My first producer once told me that he can get the song to 90% in a month – but to 100% it will take him three or even more. I had to accept leaving them around 88% - the perfectionist in me was fuming, but it was the only way”.

When asked if he’d do anything differently, DAMARIN said that he would find ways to record more vocal parts, especially female harmonies, perhaps replace some of the VSTs with acoustic instruments processed heavily electronically. He’d like to have more hardware to play with – more physicality in his music, a way to make it more tangible and sensorial. “Tactile, y’know”. He’d find a way to get more money to grow the arrangements and create bigger soundscapes.

He seems to know where he is going with his art but anxiety fills him as he doesn’t know where the world is going and whether his path will be possible in this chaos that seems to be eternally unfolding. We left him after our Zoom call, staring into the screen with a cat purring on his lap, noodling on the harmonica, having lost focus but looking at peace.