Sweet Young Solitude by Dim Kouchnir

by Dim Kouchnir

I guess to start things off I didn’t really have this direct introduction to music as blatantly most people get it (I think). You could say I kinda got ushered into it slowly during the period of 14 to 20ish.

Around my mid-teens, I started writing poetry in my native language which is Flemish (same as dutch), and in that same period, I also got into dancing, particularly in the styles hip-hop, poppin’, and bboying. Being a dancer and mainly educating myself in the field choreography, I got in contact with a lot of the musical influences that show themselves in my work today.

I think of people like: Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, Kid Cudi, Kanye West, Sholomo, Clams Casino; and the list goes on…

I remember my dance tutor having this immense iTunes library, and after a lot nagging, I got him to put it on my blackberry tablet (hahaha). Having that period in my life gave me a passion for music in general, And helped me to develop my taste.

Listen to the album while reading the text.

Writing

However, toward the beginning of 2016, dancing became a less prominent aspect of my life. This because I found myself not being able to juggle coping and investing time in dance with the loss of my mother due to overdose happening earlier in October of 2015.

Writing, on the other hand, was something I found a lot of comfort in throughout that time. Thus writing became my main focus as dance slowly faded in the background…

I also started to write in English because it gave me a certain distance from the seriousness and intensity of certain situations (if that makes any sense?). I also found that writing in English gave me a broader pallet of expression, so that became the primary language in which I wanted to express myself.

Vocalizing

As I continued to write, I got in touch with a guy from high school who’s now a good friend of mine. Him rapping himself encouraged me to rap my poems over Dilla beats.

I was terrible at it at first (haha), but he believed in my power as a lyricist, and that gave me the confidence to practice vocalizing my poems over instrumentals.

Songwriting

As time progressed, it turned into songwriting, those were the humble beginnings of me developing myself as a musical artist. It was only for fun at the beginning, up until the point of the summer of 2017 where I got inspired to get my first DAW running to learn myself how to make beats.

That summer, I Invested all my time watching tutorials on youtube as to how Ableton worked, writing, and practicing on becoming a better artist in general. It was around that summer/fall the events that inspired my debut project ‘Dead Leaves’ took place.

Dead Leaves

I met this girl online (on tinder lol) with whom I had an overall good relationship for little more than over a year. We had good conversations and were able to understand one another. After a while, I decided to ask her out, but at the time she had to decline because of the fact she was going to study abroad in South-Korea for four months.

But that fact didn’t discourage us, and the continuation of our conversations eventually led me to a point where I went to pay her a visit in South Korea, (my first date with her was on the other side of the globe lol). In that exact same period where I was in the early stages of my relationship with this girl, I lost my father due to him taking his own life. I heard the news one week before my departure to Seoul, and the day after his funeral I hopped on the flight.

It was surreal.

That surrealness, the contrast of feeling love and grief were the thriving forces behind me submerging myself in expressing these feelings by making beats, and writing lyrics.

After sporadically finishing up seven rough drafts of beats, and having thought out the lyrics, I got in contact through the same friend from high-school with a well-renounced producer in the area that helped me realizing my rough drafts into finished results.

That marked my first release and my humble beginnings as an artist who seeks out to establish a serious and successful music career.