Sterile synthesizers, warm basses and lush R’n’B beats. Arrangements and melodies that, together with the lyrics, conjure up a world complete in itself. What started as a sound experiment on old, dilapidated keyboards now finds its completion in the debut album “post-human” (Assim Records) of the electro-pop duo NEON NEET. In an interview with Michael Ternai, DORIAN WINDEGGER and PHILIPP KOELL talk about their intensive sound work, their penchant for perfectionism and their shared musical ideas.
Listening through your album, one quickly gets the impression that you have approached the subject of electro-pop somewhat differently – in a positive sense.
Dorian Windegger: I’m glad to hear that you think that’s positive. I think that some people are less able to deal with our otherness. But we just want to sound different. Nonetheless, we want to make our songs at least danceable.
Philipp Koell: Our sound has a lot to do with what we have heard in the last years. On the one hand, we like experimental and electronic stuff like James Blake, Aphex Twin or some post-dubstep stuff, but, on the other hand, we also like classic pop acts like Rosalía. All of these things ultimately flow into our music in some form or another. And I think you can hear that. But yes, we do work a lot with sounds.
That’s also apparent.
Dorian Windegger: Phil is mainly responsible for the sound. He is a real sound developer.
Philipp Koell: I just love sound design. In various ways, too. Sometimes I can’t sleep and sit down in my bed with my laptop and experiment all night long. But we also go searching together and plug our synths in with ten thousand effect units and see what happens. I think we’re also masters of not being satisfied and throwing things away. There are at least three versions of each of our songs lying around somewhere, and then they somehow come back together in the end in a form that suits us best. At least at that moment, because if we wanted to, we could keep tweaking things forever.
So you are quite the perfectionists.
Dorian Windegger: You could say that. That’s why it took so long with the first album. Finishing some numbers was a long process. “Down”, for example, the single we just released, was a completely different song until half a year ago. The basic structure was already there, but then we had another production session in which we went over the song mercilessly. In the end, the chorus and the chords were completely different, and Phil then brought in the Caribbean with a reggaeton beat, which completely changed the original character of the song.
You’ve known each other since your school days and started making music together early on. How did you actually find each other musically?
Philipp Koell: You could say on the way to school. We both got on the bus at the same stop and on the rides we talked a lot about music. It became clear to us very quickly that we shared roughly the same musical taste. And that’s how our friendship developed.
Dorian Windegger: At some point, our school board took the initiative to set up a rehearsal room at our school. We jammed there a few times until we were finally invited to play at the school festival. We asked some friends if they wanted to play in a band with us, and that’s how our first live concert happened.
With time, however, we realized that the two of us were moving away from the band sound. The others wanted to go in the direction of indie rock, while we wanted to go in a more electronic direction. We just had different sound ideas.
What’s funny is that we’re actually back to a band live now, trying to bring something analog back to the electronic.
Philipp Koell: A band also brings a different dynamic. It’s something different when we’re both sitting around the table together and tinkering with songs than when we’re in the rehearsal room with the others and everyone can get involved with their own ideas about how they want to play something on their instruments.
When did it become clear for you in which direction the sound should go?
Dorian Windegger: It actually developed relatively organically.
Philipp Koell: I remember that at that time, I moved from Tyrol to Salzburg because of my studies, where I started working intensively on a sound. When I visited Dorian at home for Christmas, he asked me what I was working on at the moment, and I played him some demos. When he heard them, he said I should send him some stuff the day after, he wanted to sing over it right away. That demo never got released, but we started sending stuff back and forth on a regular basis.
Dorian Windegger: When I first heard what Phil was doing, I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard anything like that before.” Then, a few months later in the summer, when Phil was back in Tyrol, we started jamming a bit to the songs and recording stuff for the first time.
Philipp Koell: Basically, we wrote our first EP in my parents’ basement during that time.
Dorian Windegger: But then it stayed in the drawer for a while, because we didn’t know what to do with it now. We were not so well connected at that time. Moreover, I then went to Vienna and Phil back to Salzburg. We have Mario Fartacek to thank for the fact that the whole story got off the ground. At the end of 2018, we were in the studio with him and finalized our stuff. At the same time “Assim Records” was launched; they wanted to “sign” us as the first act of the label.
“We actually know relatively quickly if a song we’re working on is right for us.”
What “post-human” also shows is that you are not at all afraid of great variety. You dare experiments and also stylistic ruptures. Is this musical variety something like a motto of yours?
Dorian Windegger: Cool that you ask that. The last person who asked us about this great variety or these sometimes abrupt changes was our mastering engineer Alexandr Vatagin. That was the first time I thought to myself, “Yes, that’s right, only a few people do it as blatantly as we do.” But there’s absolutely no plan behind it. The songs and the sometimes abstruse song forms just come out of us.
Philipp Koell: We actually know relatively quickly whether a song we’re working on is right for us. And it doesn’t matter if it’s very different or contrary to the others. Somehow, we have developed a feeling for it. And we don’t even feel as if there are many ruptures. But for someone from the outside, that can probably be the case.
As I mentioned before, the stuff we listen to also plays a role, of course. The more different music I listen to, the more creative I feel. I get to see what exciting things are happening in all kinds of different directions. And that’s where you sometimes find one or the other element for your own music.
What’s also exciting about you is the contrast between your positive sound and the partly very thoughtful lyrics. To what extent do the lyrics reflect your own personality?
Philipp Koell: A friend wrote something nice about our new song “Down”. She wrote that she had the song playing while she was cleaning and was really excited that it was so catchy and “good feeling”. Then she listened to the lyrics more closely and was surprised how sad it actually is.
Dorian Windegger: Of course, my personality is reflected in all my lyrics somehow. It’s just that I like to hide behind the hypothetical people that the songs are about. I also have the feeling that people are not that interested in what I feel now. I need to make it about a larger cast of representative characters so it’s a little more universal. I’m not a person who can write out the deepest inner feelings so easily. So if it seems a little more melancholic or sad, that’s really due to the fact that I’m looking rationally at the things I’m writing about, because it’s not directly about me, but the story is going through a different channel. There is, I think, one song that really comes straight from the bottom.
There’s also the fact that I’ve had some experiences in that regard as well. I used to have problems with being on stage with all the emotionality as a frontman. I was sometimes exhausted after the concerts because I felt so vulnerable. Back then, with our first band, I just wrote way too much of myself into the lyrics, which made me very vulnerable and therefore not such a good frontman, because I took every reaction from the audience very personally. Somehow, I couldn’t get over that. That’s why I write my lyrics more rationally now.
In any case, it went quite fast with you, which speaks for the fact that your music is very well received. After the EP, you were relatively quickly on everyone’s lips. You were invited to the Reeperbahnfestival in Hamburg and your songs are also played regularly on the radio. Are you surprised that it happened so fast?
Dorian Windegger: Fast is relative. After the release of the EP, Corona followed soon after. And in this time, quite a lot has happened. But yes, since Corona and the rules associated with it have slowly come to an end, things have been moving along nicely. We’ve also known for a while when the album will be released, and we’ve been building and organizing a lot of things in advance. Now we’re hoping that it will really get going.
Philipp Koell: For me, our first single “Extension” triggered something. It was already going fast, but with the release of the single, the whole story became real for me. We were hunkered down in the basement rehearsal room for a summer, writing songs over the winter as well, conceptualizing the whole time, then recording and getting the stuff mastered and taking care of the cover and the videos and then putting the thing out. I can still remember driving to Vienna for our first gig on the Friday after the release and finding out on the way home from the concert that the single had entered the FM4 charts. That’s when I just thought to myself, “Wow.”
Thank you very much for the interview.
Michael Ternai
Translated from the German original by Itta Francesca Ivellio-Vellin.