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Dublin based, Irish producer and multi-instrumentalist Sal Dulu has shared his new single ‘Full Metal’, the latest cut to be lifted off his highly anticipated second album Nafuchsia In Fantasy, releasing on 15 November via Duluoz Records.
New track ‘Full Metal’ speaks in all the genre languages in which Sal Dulu is fluent. As a breezy trip-hop drum beat gets warped and glitched into complex patterns and stuttering tempos. With a background awash with dreamscape synths, the focal point swaps between sampled saxophone and soaring vocals. ‘Full Metal’ is a fine example of what Sal Dulu does best, a magpie approach of taking shining highlights from a wide mix of genres, creating an eclectic, experimental sound, pushing at the boundaries of electronic, jazz and hip-hop all at once.
Speaking on the new single, Dulu offers:
"Yeah I remember "Full Metal" was the first bit of music that I made after I had surgery. I broke my collarbone in four pieces so I had to get a metal plate put in."
‘Full Metal’ is taken from Sal Dulu’s forthcoming sophomore record Nafuchsia In Fantasy, releasing on 15 November, with singles ‘Nafuchsia’, ‘Purple Heaven’ and ‘Neri Eyes’ featuring rapper Fly Anakin already out in the world. On Nafuchsia In Fantasy, Sal Dulu defies genre and has minted a new sound which is entirely his own. An unconventional but harmonious marriage of hip-hop, jazz, garage, ambient and IDM. Whilst hazy and ethereal on first listen, across all the tracks on Nafuchsia In Fantasy, the devil is in the detail. Intricate glitches and flourishes warp the perception of rhythm and meter, whilst finely tuned synths and sampled found-sounds detail tracks of piano and guitar.
Sal Dulu’s debut album, 2021’s Xompulse was championed by The Observer, The Financial Times, The Line Of Best Fit, Uncut, Mojo and many more, with Dulu’s ability to evoke a waking dream-like state into his detailed compositions particularly praised.
More About Sal Dulu
Irish producer Sal Dulu’s moniker is something he considers as relatively insignificant. It’s a random decision he made years ago that’s stuck. Still, it’s arguably indicative of his approach to creativity: “Sal Dulu” is rooted in his teen love of the Beat Generation – Sal as in, Sal Paradise, Dulu as in, Jack Duluouz. These were both semi-autobiographical characters written by Jack Kerouac, who was known for his dizzying stream-of-consciousness style of writing.
Real name Senan Magee, Sal Dulu’s way of making music sits somewhere in that same vein of unplanned experimentation. The Dublin-based producer’s expansive yet fragmentary worlds are born out of sitting in the studio late into the night and, as he puts it, “seeing what happens.” You can hear that sense of hazy, explorative nocturnal freedom on his acclaimed debut album, 2021’s Xompulse, which won praise from the Guardian, Bandcamp, the Line of Best Fit, the Financial Times and more. Now he is gearing up to release the record’s vibrant follow-up, Nafuchsia In Fantasy, named in part after his girlfriend.
His work broadly fits under the umbrella of instrumental electronica – although, Nafuchsia In Fantasy does have a stellar feature from Virginia rapper Fly Anakin on the almost liturgic ‘Neri Eyes’. Still, it’s difficult to pin down Sal Dulu to just one style. “I just like music in general,” he says, “It’s hard to limit that to one genre.” This is in part due to the breadth of his musical upbringing, starting out visiting his cousins in Ireland’s countryside. They had converted an old horse stable into a jam room, playing bass and drums and having a laugh. But young Senan felt out of place being unable to play an instrument, and so he spent a summer learning guitar so he could join in. Back then, he was listening to classic rock – The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles – and his early music aspirations were to be in a band. “But every band I was in always failed, like, really badly,” he laughs. By his late teens, he had moved to London, and his listening habits had shifted to jazz and hip-hop, but the only instrument he knew was guitar, and so he was still hopelessly chasing after life in a band. Then, after a particularly bad group dissolution, he realised that relying on other people was getting him nowhere, and so, aged 22, he downloaded Logic, and slowly taught himself how to make his own sounds, learning this new digital musical language.
His process back then, he concedes, involved a lot of drinking to quell the walls and doubts in his mind that his creative flow would come up against. But sometime after Xompulse’s release, a football injury meant his collarbone broke in four places. He is thankful for the incident, which forced him to slow down and get healthy, he explains: “It meant I kind of fixed that problem, where I felt like I needed to drink to make music. Which is good, ‘cos that…wasn’t sustainable.”
Nafuchsia In Fantasy is not explicitly a record about that period of time, but one that is reflective of his inner-world and its shifting memories of moods, desires and anxieties. That can mean occasional frantic turmoil – “Not that I’m in bad shape,” he clarifies quickly – with tracks like the frenzied discomfort of ‘Trapped In Container Hell’, a reflection on his struggles with sleep. “I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night freaking out and think I’m in a box.” But also this is a record that swells with the soft, mundane excitement of the quotidian, cut through with textures of voice notes from his girlfriend. There are also lines from ‘70s American TV adverts which resonated with him; he mentions he enjoyed experimenting with his new modular synthesiser to pitch these almost unrecognisably, reflecting some kind of inner-monologue.
Skittering jazz beats, plush keys and synthesised choirs, along with colourful flecks and splats of distorted brass and collagist sampled vocals, all bring to life the flickering, relentless cascading of his ruminations in an almost painterly way. In fact, Sal Dulu says fine art has been a big source of inspiration this time around. “I don’t have a developed sense of taste, I don’t really know anything about art or painters, but it’s exciting to be kind of naive about it,” he explains. He namechecks 19th century English painter John Martin and his derided art, the most famous of which are his theatrical, fantastical renderings of hell. “I think I was partly inspired to make a hellscape,” Dulu laughs. But mainly, he says, looking at paintings pushed him to think beyond traditional song structures and embrace the fantasy of creativity.
And so, Nafuchsia In Fantasy takes that blank canvas and revels in experimenting with all the possibilities.
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