Dandi Wind and Szam Findlay
Meet Dandi and Szam, the incredible duo that together go by the name Dandi Wind. They are a little more than your average band. The two make visuals and music to go hand in hand with larger-than-life ambitions. They are like kindred spirits, and they finish each other's sentences!
SS: Tell us about your first, second and third albums all in one go!
Dandi Wind: We have now our first album, Concrete Igloo, that’s coming out here really soon. It’s really fast, every song is fast, there’s a punk energy, I think.
Szam Findlay: It’s kind of like our live…
Dandi: …On record and then we have a full second album, Yolk of the Golden Egg, which is going to come out in July or quite soon after that is slower, more melodic and more personal basically. And we are already working on the third album now. All three of them are electronics-based. The third one is more like a fantasy album (smiles), taking on the roles of different characters.
Szam: It’s not a very concept album, it’s just like fantasy lyrics, just things that Dandi and I have read and seemed fascinated and tried to imagine…
Dandi: …If I was that character, they’re like character driven songs basically. It’s kind of like Kate Bush, you know how she takes on the roles of different characters in every song. It’s hard to categorise because we like so much different stuff that we have glam rock from the 70s and early 80s German electro and more arty stuff as well and we mix it all up and sometimes we do it straight up like a fun glam rock song or we’ll do something really bizarre and inspired by maybe Kate Bush or something like that. So the album’s all over the map and it’s really hard to describe what we do.
SS: You seem to be finishing off each other’s sentences, how long have you known each other for?
Dandi: We met when we were 12 or 13 and have been friends forever and working together on art projects when I was si16-17 and now we do music together when we were 19 or 20 and now we’re 24.
Szam: Forever! (Laughs)
Dandi: Forever! (Laughs) We live together we are always working on stuff and when we’re at home we don’t go out much we just stay home work on music and watch films, since the weather’s so cold in the winter especially and in the summer it’s so hot you don’t want to go out any way, so we’re a great team! (Laughs)
SS: You’re both artists?
Dandi: Yeah, I sculpt and I do some fashion stuff and make music videos - I do stop motion animation with clay.
Szam: I just do music actually (laughs), but I do other music as well, preceding Dandi Wind.
SS: Videos seem to be such a big aspect for your band.
Dandi: [On Concrete Igloo] there’ll be like ten videos on so you put the CD on the computer and you can watch it. We generally just work on videos together and sometimes we work with a third person.
SS: Was this the idea that originally got you to start making music?
Dandi: Well we start off doing visual art together and some video work and stuff and we start doing the music so it fits in with our visual art in the same sense.
SS: Is it now still the same objective for you guys?
Dandi: I still wanna make videos but I’d like to make videos that have a bit of a budget because all the videos I made for the first album basically didn’t cost a thing and we had no funding at all. We just used this old camera of mine and then we did the videos for the second album we had the funding and the production quality is a lot better. I really want to maintain that level of professionalism from now on (laughs) so I won’t make a video unless I do have some money now basically.
Szam: But if what you mean is will we still have visuals now, we would never do without!
Dandi: We actually did a show for an art gallery in San Francisco and we made a 45 min backing video to go with the music and it’s animated and it’s quick and simple. But we wanna continue doing more visuals with the show and project animation and also have more of a set in the future and we will. We haven’t got to that yet because we need some kind of funding.
We don’t do what we’d like to do yet the moment. There’s a Canadian band called The Skinny Puppy, they’re from Vancouver where we’re from and when we were teenagers we really liked them and they had four massive sets and we kind of wanted, we were inspired by them. It’s too hard to transport anything and it’s too expensive but if we did like a one-off show then we could perhaps do it that way.
SS: Music-wise, are you more inspired by the visuals or the sound?
Szam: We’re more inspired by the visuals or just..
Dandi: …Or something that we might have read in the newspaper, something that’s happened and we might be inspired by that or we watched a film that was absolutely incredible, I might write lyrics based on the film. For some reason recently we haven’t really been listening to that much music, have we?
Szam: It’s kind of unpleasant to listen to music when all you do is make music, to be honest with you. We make a lot any way and all that goes through our ears is music but we love music, lots of music. But right now I don’t know how much of it actually directly influences the way we sound.
Dandi: Although the last two years we haven’t had a proper stereo…
Szam: …Just the laptop.
Dandi: Which is crap so we haven’t been listening to much music in the past couple of years but watching films and documentary so that’s what’s been inspiring us.
SS: Is this why there seems to be some sort of themes or concepts running through each albums?
Szam: It happens naturally actually. The second album was inspired by new events that have happened while the first album was being promoted so naturally you have a group of songs that are almost like an album.
Dandi: We do write songs quickly so I guess they do encompass a time in our lives and then a theme sort of comes to it later.
Szam: If naturally an album is a diary, it’s kind of weird how bands put an album out once every three years because how can you do twelve songs to represent that long period of time? To us it seems more logical that you do an album every three months or every six months because that’s more like a logical period of time.
SS: But then you’ll end up with too many materials.
Dandi: It’s difficult for us because people don’t wanna put them out as fast as we’d like to.
Szam: We’d like to put albums out really quickly like in the 60s, The Rolling Stones put out three albums in a year, and we’d like to do something like that. These days it’s getting too expensive and the labels don’t want to do it, albums nowadays they promote it for 1-2 years, you hear something and it’s been promoted for a long long time. But as an artist, it seems more logical to try keep an honest statement of certain period of time that you can logically see. It’s too long it’s hard to see how everything fits together or your problem is you get to the end and the beginning is too old and you have to update that you take forever time to bring everything together.
SS: That’s really interesting because the problem with most bands today is that their first album is really strong because they’ve had their whole life to make it and it’s really good and comes the second album they’ve run out of things to say.
Dandi: Quite often with bands when you hear the first album does really well and they spend a long time promoting it and suddenly they’re pushed into the studio with no songs and they’re forced to write it really quickly, and maybe their personalities have changed too because of their success or whatever they haven’t had that much time to think about the songs because that’s actually really hard to do when you’re on tour.
Szam: Some people can do it but we really can’t. It’s hard to find personal inspirations. I mean we find all kinds of things when we’re touring actually but it’s just hard to just write songs, taking ideas and noting them down and then later make them into something song-worthy.
SS: Will things change for you if/when things blow up?
Dandi: Well things won’t! (Laughs) We’ll make sure of that!
Szam: It doesn’t affect us any way.
Dandi: We’ve done this for so long that there’s no way that we would change personality-wise. I mean I could imagine if you were a teenager and if it blows up and it would then change your personality but we’ll always be the same.
Szam: We’re not inspired by things that are hip any way, things that we’re interested in are never gonna be popular or hip or no one else would bother to be interested in them. We’ll still be interested in random things, whether we’re unsuccessful or successful, it makes no difference.
Dandi wears black top by Future Ozbek, beaded belt by Guilia Piersanti and gold spats (worn as gloves) by Strumpet & Pink. Sazm wears laser-cut leather spats (as gloves) by Strumpet & Pink and vintage fur scarf from Annie's.
Photography: Kriangkrai Srithongthai