Diorama
I've Always Written Sad Songs

14.01.2011

Torben Wendt, the mastermind behind German synth pop/darkwave act Diorama, is a person that cannot pass unnoticed. A tall man with somewhat toney walk and gestures and a sarcastic smile – I was “noticing” all that for more than an hour while watching the band’s soundcheck from the third floor of Moscow’s Tochka Club. My interview time had long been overdue, but I wasn’t concerned – no matter how strange it may sound, there were no other reporters around, which allowed me to conclude that I will be the only person to interview Torben that night. And even though I was anxious to discuss with Mr. Wendt his new release cryptically titled “Cubed” and many other things, I was quietly waiting for my time.
Finally the souncheck, which took so long because of technical issues, was over, and Torben went up to the chillout room holding a glass of black tea. It turned out that he had partially lost his voice at the Yekaterinburg gig the night before and was now trying to get it back with the help of hot (but not heating!) drinks. Having expressed my sympathy for Torben and my hope that everything would be fine by the showtime (that’s exactly what happened!), I got down to my favorite business – asking questions.

The title of your new album can bring to mind a lot of things. But what does the term “cubed” mean to you personally?

There’re a lot of different aspects and meanings of that title, of course… And there are different ways that you can interpret it. The main reason for choosing this title is that I tried to find a word to describe personal habitat of an individual. Like the space around him… And I found it. The picture of the cube that surrounds us everywhere we go and whatever we do is very suitable as a metaphor for the space that surrounds us and the limitation that surrounds us also, because we cannot escape the cube. Each of us is forced to die and there’s nothing after life and nothing before, there’s kind of hopeless standpoint, but still the album is about finding ways to deal with this hopeless standpoint and to make the best out of it.

So you don’t believe in life after death, do you?

No… Why should I?

Well, I think lots of people do believe in it…

Then lots of people are stupid. (laughs) No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be arrogant. But I’ve never seen any proof or anything that would make me believe that there’s something afterwards. There’s nothing but some vague religious statements that don’t convince me. But everybody should think what they want to think. I’m not the one to tell everybody: “Hey you! You shouldn’t believe in God, you shouldn’t believe in devil or something”. I don’t care.

But if you have that attitude towards life and death you need to enjoy every second of your life to be sure that you don’t spend it in vain. Am I right?

Yeah, a very good point! That’s one of the ideas that we’ve got beyond “Cubed”, that even if you know that you’re kind of “playing the lost game” you still have ways and possibilities to make the best out of it. You have friends, you have music, you have other things that you like, whatever it is – sports, dancing, clothes, interests, hobbies… And these are the things that you fill your cube up with, that you decorate everything around you with, to make you feel more happy.

You released two editions of “Cubed” – the white one and the black one. Does it mean that the additional songs on “Cubed Black” make it sound kind of “darker”?

(pause) Actually there’s no high significance behind the color. We just wanted to make two editions and we wanted them to be different from each other. That’s why we have the white edition and the black edition. The black edition comes with a bonus CD and lots of graphical material and we also have like a folding cube that you can set up in the package. So it’s an extended edition, a limited edition of the album. We wanted this limited edition to look different, to be something special. And we thought, “Well, the normal, the regular album is white - then let’s do a black version”. There’s no bigger difference that you can make of this black and white contrast.

You said in one of your previous interviews about the album’s first single “Child of Entertainment” that it “puts a lot of my personal awareness of life over the past 3 years in a nutshell”. Please explain what happened to you in these 3 years.

Well… I had a really lousy job. The job itself wasn’t lousy, but the environment in which I had to work was difficult for me… I was really stressed and I was discovering that I was slightly loosing the ability to make music, because of lack of time, lack of sleep, lack of energy. When I got home in the evening at eight or nine o’clock I was just done. And then there were many concerts on the weekends, so I didn’t really have time to produce new music. That was something that I really missed a lot and I recognized that if I had to choose between a life as an office clerk or the life of an entertainer, I would say that my heart tends into the direction of entertaining people. This is my task and this is the role that is way more than just being an obedient worker. I had to convince myself of this idea. I had to find the courage again. So this song and the whole album “Cubed” helped me to quit the job, actually. I quit it. And the song “Child of Entertainment” for me – of course it also has different layers and meanings – but for me it’s about the contradiction between making art, enjoying life of an entertainer, enjoying wine and women… (laughs) and the life as a non-artist.

In the video for this song three men take part in a game called “Who am I?”. They try to guess who you are and fail. Is it because it’s difficult to identify an entertainer?

That’s the contradiction that I just mentioned displayed in the video also… You have this guy who goes into TV show and he doesn’t really have a concept of who he is. He’s kind of caught between different worlds, he doesn’t really have an identity. And this is the one thing that the guessing team cannot know. They cannot find it out, they don’t have imagination for it. Of course the video as the song is about finding ways to find yourself again to reassure who you really are and what your targets are… This is why everybody’s curious about the identity of the person in that TV show, because he has lost his identity. He’s empty.

Once you said that you like to think of your band as of a “dark horse”, meaning, as far as I understand it, that your band is not really well known, but the people who get to know it become your true fans. But if you’re not trying to be as famous as possible, then what does success mean to you?

I think that I have the same vision of success that everybody else has - wealth and fame and being popular and having huge audiences and everything. This is something I cannot say that I wouldn’t want, okay? But I’ve never had success factors like these as my point of orientation. We just made the music that we happened to feel comfortable with. And the rest followed. I mean, I can’t say that we’re in the top league of this scene or that we’re international superstars. But as long as we have bookers and supporters like the Russian crew, who booked us for the forth or fifth time in the meantime, we’re happy with everything and we’re blessed and we’re proud and we don’t need anything more, it’s okay like it is. If you ask for success than of course there’s another factor to it… I mean, all the musicians would mention that you need to express yourself and stay honest to yourself and to your ideals… But that’s self-evident, I don’t want to repeat this basis, it’s understood.

Let’s talk about something less “self-evident” then. Why do you so rarely sing in your native language?

I have no idea. When I sit down at my piano to do my songwriting or ideas just pop up in my head, they happen to pop up in English most of the time. I’m not sitting there with a pen in my hand saying, “Okay, I intend to write a German song, or maybe a French one…” I just free my mind and let my thoughts stream and whatever I get back I just try to transform into music. And I don’t know why but most of the time English phrases and lines come up.

So maybe it’s just a better language for your songs…

Maybe it’s a question of influences. I never really heard German music. Except for one guy whose name is Reinhard Mey. He’s in my opinion the only seriously great songwriter and singer who has German lyrics. And apart from him I’m not so much into German music.

What does inspire your lyrics and your concepts?

I would say that’s the special conditions and circumstances of life and the period of time when each album was created. And everything that has an impact on me, everything that comes into my mind can be an influence. Life itself.

Do you have any periods when you can’t find any inspiration?

Yes, I do have these periods and mostly after an album is finished. I just need half a year or even a whole year off just to collect new thoughts, new ideas, just to find the energy again that pushes me to write new songs, to write the next chapter. I’m not a conveyor belt, I’m not a machine. So I need to live, to make experiences, to make new experiences. And then I have the material to write new songs again. I cannot just write songs about nothing.

As far as I know you started creating music when you were about 12. What were your first songs like?

(smiles) You’re very well informed. Respect for that! Very-very good preparation. Well… Twelve… The first songs were, you know, very childish songs about some topics that have been on my mind in that time - teenage depression, suicide fantasies, I don’t know… I can say that I’ve always written sad songs, I’ve never ever written any happy ones. Maybe it’s too simple, I haven’t any songs that one would consider as happy. I wouldn’t say that there’re no happy moments in our music, but I’ve never written something like “life is beautiful and I’m really happy with everything just like it is” because I’ve never been like this, I think. That’s why I started very early… to write songs about the death of Curt Cobain, for example. It was a great inspiration, I don’t know why.

And what were these songs like music-wise?

Piano. Purely piano and vocals. I didn’t have anything else. All this came later.

You said in one interview that the 4 things you enjoy are music, movies, sports and journeys. We’ve just discussed music, so let’s talk about movies. What kind of movies do you like?

At the moment I find it really difficult to discover new movies. I live in a rather small city in Germany and our cinema always has Hollywood productions that I cannot watch because it’s just too cheap. But I really like movies from Spain, from France, the “Dogme” films from Scandinavia, Lars von Trier, I like Jim Jarmusch movies… I adore David Lynch. “Lost Highway” is one of my favorite movies, “Mulholland Drive” also. Movies like those - strange, dark movies… Movies that are not produced according to a certain scheme – that’s what I meant talking about Hollywood movies, they all follow a certain plot and you know that the lovers will be together in the end and who’s gonna die and you know that children never die and that dogs never die. (smiles) I like movies were dogs die and where children die. It doesn’t have to be, but it has to be a movie that doesn’t follow a certain scheme that has been repeated over and over again.

I see… And what about sports?

At the moment hiking. Hiking in the mountains.

What’s so good about it?

Well, the ability to breath. To breath easily and really feel it. And have an overview, over everything – that’s what I like about it at the moment, it helps me in sorting out my head.

What are the things you pay attention to first of all when you get to an unknown city? You know, some people are interested in architecture, some in shops or whatever…

I’ve always loved to walk. You can put me in any city and I can walk around for hours. And that’s the way, I believe, you can discover the city’s nature best of all. Just walking around and looking at things. I’m not particularly interested in sightseeing objects, castles and churches. I’m much more interested in the atmosphere of the city, I look in the faces of people and like to see if they smile back if I smile at them, I want to see how the people are dressed, what colors are present in this city. Is it more like a grey city or is it a colorful city. What mood is in the air… These are the things that fascinate me.

We have just a minute left, so say a few of words to our readers please.

Well, it doesn’t sound new, I know, but it’s really a great pleasure to see how much interest we have received especially from our Russian audience since years now. And this is something that we really appreciate and that we’re really grateful for, honestly. Our fans are a big part of why we’re so motivated to continue our musical way and why we always love to come back to Russia and to meet the Russian audience and to enjoy the moments that we have here.

Diorama on the Internet: http://www.diorama-music.com/

Special thanks to Nastya Serebrennik and the Russian Synth Community crew for arranging this interview

Ksenia Artamonova
November 4, 2010
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