Plini: The Secret Ingredient
In recent years the increase in the number of self-proclaimed ‘bedroom guitarists’ has risen significantly, particularly since the dreaded 2020 when people had little else to do but level up their songwriting abilities. One particular musician who has never had any intention to hop on board the next trend or clamber for international stardom is Australia’s PLINI. His uncompromisingly vibrant array of releases have been consistently impressive and his freshly released Mirage EP as continued his evolution.
“I started writing again in 2021 and we were still heavily locked down in Australia, I couldn’t tour so thought I may as well put another release out there. I wanted to try some new things, I used live strings which was a super fun thing to do. I also played an instrument called an Ood which was fucking hard! It’s fretless and not having my training wheels for the first time in 20 years taught me that my pitch sucks. I find I’m getting less and less interested in statistics and comments these days but we got a positive response from the songs we’ve played live so far so it’s looking good! I tend to obsess more over the making of the actual music than how it is received.”
PLINI is meticulous in his approach, mostly starting with a few sparks of inspiration and using those foundations as a base to embellish with intricacies along the way. “Song ideas are almost like ingredients you have in your fridge, like it tastes cool but what the fuck do I combine it with, and then one day you’ll just go ‘ah yes! Chicken! It’s a process of learning different arrangement techniques and using different instruments and then sometimes an old idea just suddenly works. I feel like I’m at my most creative when there are no time constraints, I find I can get a bit cluttered in my head if I feel rushed so giving it as much space as it needed made a big difference. This time I actually sat with the material I’d wrote and revisited when I came back from tour to make sure it was exactly what I wanted it to be and was to the best of my abilities.”
As is the case with many a budding instrumentalist, PLINI is always compiling an archive of ideas that he can tap into when its time to get the next release under way. “When I feel like I’m gonna start working on a project I’ll go through them and see what feels inspiring enough to pursue. I dabbled with quite a few but stuck to five tracks this time. I had the initial idea for The Red Fox back in 2018 but it has ended up sounding nothing like what it did initially. It was one of those that kept getting copied and pasted into each new folder I started working on and this time I finally figured it out.”
Some musicians draw from other forms of artistic expression such as literature, paintings or idyllic landscapes. This is something PLINI hopes he can harness somewhere down the line. “I find the idea of sitting on a balcony in a different country and coming up with a song very romantic but the reality is more sitting in the same room at home for eight hours! I remember saying at the beginning of the lockdown that it almost felt like a school holiday where you could do whatever you wanted and in some sense that felt quite freeing. I’ve tried to hold on to that mentality of not writing music just because it feels like it needs to be done. I went to Yosemite National Park and did a couple of insanely beautiful hikes and felt like I needed to capture that experience in a song but for one reason or another I just never did.”
To a lot of musicians, the thought of getting yourself onto a stage and performing in front of thousands of people is the main driving force. Initially, PLINI has no intentions of taking his material out on the road and is still pinching himself as to how he got to be in such a fortunate position, playing some of the most high profile festivals the world has to offer. “I remember being a kid and watching DREAM THEATER‘s Live At The Budokan DVD and thinking about how cool it would be to do that. I just kind of kept making music for fun and people kept booking me for stuff which to me is just ridiculous. I remember being at Download Festival, sitting on the Ferris wheel and watching GUNS N’ ROSES headline with a sea of 100,000 people below me wondering ‘what am I doing here?’.”
Mirage is out now via self-release.
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