Interview with Kym Dillon by Freya Bennett
Hi Kym, congratulations on your debut album, VENDESTINY, how’re you feeling now that it’s finished?
Thank you! It’s been a project two years in the making, from initially having the idea of doing this album, to writing the music, to recording it all on a beautiful Steinway piano, to releasing it — all a very new experience for me!
I feel proud that I’ve been able to express in this album what I sought out to express, and it feels like it’s now time to hand it over to everyone; I’ve nurtured it, but from now on it belongs to everyone, and I can’t wait for people to find their own relationship to it. I also can’t wait to perform it around the place for people and share this experience live!
VENDESTINY is such a unique title, what does it mean to you?
This word popped into my head before writing any of the music on the album. To me its a word that hovers on the edges of language, which activates a sense of curiosity and openness to whatever may come musically. I think of it as word capturing the many different paths and person can take, the many different sides and shades to a personality, how each one of our lives is connected to those around us, and about embracing all this multiplicity. When I think of it and hear the music on the album, it activates it in just the right way.
You’ve described each piece as beginning as a “musical seed”, can you talk us through what that very first moment of creation looks or feels like for you?
It often starts with me playing around with ideas at the piano, as I have always loved to do since I was little. Once I find an idea that sparks me, like a succession of chords, or a groove, or a melody, I organically let the piece evolve out of it, and let my emotions colour it. I do this by improvising with that idea, recording what I’ve done, spending time away from the piano listening to that recording to find what I like, what I would change, where I would like it to go next, then I go back to the piano and put these thoughts into the piece. I repeat this process throughout until I’m totally happy with every moment of the piece — and even then, the pieces still shift and change with every new performance! But to me it gives each piece this feeling of being alive, of fizzing with energy and potential.
There’s a strong sense of imagination as refuge in this album, was there a particular time in your life when you most needed that kind of inner world?
There sure was, as for the majority of my life I didn’t feel like a real person, but more like an abstract character which I inhabited and had to act out. It meant that I went through life with a constant ambient despair and a feeling of being fake, and the inner world of imagination and music was the only place I could express myself. A few years ago I figured out why I was having this dark experience: I solved the mental puzzle, I underwent gender transition, and I’ve felt like an actual person ever since. On the other side of this experience, the musical abilities that I honed in order to survive now feel like gifts I want to use to give back to the people around me.
Imagination and creativity is the soul of life, and the soul of the art I want to put out into the world. I want to celebrate the unique imagination in each and every person’s mind, and how, through imagination, we can enchant our world.
Your influences range from medieval folk to jazz to film scores, when you sit down at the piano, do you feel those influences consciously shaping the work, or do they surface more instinctively?
As a musician I’ve always been something of a chameleon, at home playing in a classical ensemble, or in a jazz combo, or accompanying a pop singer, and so on. To me it’s a bit like acting, where a performer can suddenly change into different characters, each with their own accent, mannerisms, eccentricities.
With each of the pieces on VENDESTINY, once I started them and the initial ‘world’ was set up, it was very intuitive, with the influences working subconsciously. On the medieval sounding track, ‘For Honour’, some of the harmonies have a sort of renaissance flavour to them, and this just came out of me being faithful to the musical world that had been created, and going where it was leading me. I never sit down and think to myself, ‘I’m going to write a jazz piece’, I simply write what comes to me and throw myself completely in that direction.
Vanishing Act began at a train station at night, which feels very cinematic, are you someone who is constantly collecting moments like that, and do you know right away when something will become music?
I think so many of my pieces are associated in my mind with a time of day, with an image, and with memories. Sometimes these will only become apparent to me once I’ve summoned them with music; a musical idea might suddenly make me think of a memory, and then the connection is made and both the music and the memory shape each other. I’ve been reading a lot of Marcel Proust recently where the power of sensory memory is an ever-present through line.
With Vanishing Act the feeling I had was so potent that I wrote down what I was hearing as soon as I got home from the train station. I felt an urge to return to the piano, my lifelong home, and from Vanishing Act was born the entire VENDESTINY album.
If you could tell your younger self one thing about where you are now, in your life and in music, what would it be?
I’d tell her that one day she will come to realise that all the things that make her different are actually what makes her special, and that her best music would come when she would be the most herself.
Where can we listen and learn more about your music?
VENDESTINY is out on all the usual streaming places on April 14, and will also be available on CD and Vinyl through Amica Records’ online store as well. I’m so excited for people to travel on this adventure!
