Ambient-electronic artist dné shares new single 'Basic Living' via Platoon
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New album Basic Living is out on June 19th
“Wholly personal and beautifully detailed, his lush and steady ambient instrumentals offered the kind of album that quietly swallowed you whole” GoldFlakePaint
“Like inspecting the pauses in conversation that are present in the everyday, dné will make listeners want to ruminate on the smaller details of their lives that may be undeservingly overlooked.” EARMILK
“dné will have you in blissful melancholy” Wonderland
Today, ambient-electronic artist dné (d-neh) has shared the title track from his forthcoming full-length album, Basic Living. At it's core the album, due out on June 19th via Platoon, is about being at home, watching YouTube videos and feeling that life is ok. However, many other subjects are explored; including dating and its many ups and downs, living with chronic health conditions and even taking pictures of plants in cafes for social media content.
Basic Living serves as an antithesis to all of the art that deals with "the end of the world", climate grief, current social issues or political discourse. “All of those things are valid sources for art, of course. I just wanted to make an album that covers the life in between,” says dné, real name Ondřej Holý. “I also find it refreshing when there is a person with a disability on TV or in the press and the story is not focused on overcoming hardships or telling others they "can do it". And when this one-dimensional view is replaced with showing them as a whole person with complex feelings just living their life,” he continues.
Dating, technology and the internet are recurrent themes across the album. New single ‘Basic Living’ was written when Holý’s modem stopped working prompting him to think about things that shaped the idea behind the album. The accompanying video is a postcard of life on earth, shot on 16mm camera by Jiří Makovec and conceptualised by Jakub Jirásek. Of his new single, Holý says:
"I wrote these lyrics only because my modem stopped working, I had no internet and didn’t know what to do. It’s a cryptic summary of my basic living. I even recorded my voice the next day and used that first take on the album. It was a spontaneous burst of creativity, I have to thank my internet provider for that."
Sonically, compared to dné’s debut album These Semi Feelings, They Are Everywhere (2016, Majestic Casual), on which he deliberately limited his means of expression, Basic Living is much more colourful. Great emphasis is placed on organic beats, field recordings and lo-fi aesthetics. Pure ambient passages blend with sampled and sung voices, ethereal vintage synth pads, a variety of classical instruments and midwest emo influenced guitars.
“With this album I really wanted to try things I hadn't done before, things like cutting samples into a sequence (Romantic Options, Entertainment) and making arpeggio melodies (Sunday Boost),” says Holý. “I also wanted to try to write a song with pop vocals (Traps In My Feed) and pure guitar tracks (Illnesses Are Dumb, Entertainment).”
The new album comes seven years after the release of dné’s debut album, which won two Czech music awards for Best Album (Vinyla, Apollo) and one for Best Electronic Album (Anděl). Since the release of his debut album, Holý has been composing scores for a number of films and TV series, namely the HBO documentary film Nothing Like Before and a series for Czech TV called Pět let / Five years.
Tracklist
Plant Pics
Romantic Options
Entertainment
Sunday Boost
Thanks For Getting Me Home
Illnesses Are Dumb
