Logic Lost Talks About Those Dark Times You Just Can't Forget

Dylan Amirio has a lot of regrets. As Logic Lost, Dylan makes instrumental electronic music that is still able to touch an emotional nerve. On his latest, Forgive Yourself, he turns his lens inward, creating an album that's also a meditation on regret, loss, and eventual acceptance.

There's a certain kind of anxiety that comes with growing up. Dylan's 26, a few years removed from his life at a university in Melbourne, but some of the events, and mistakes, from back then continue to haunt him. Forgive Yourself grew out of these emotions as a sort of therapeutic release of pent-up feelings and sadness.

The album is something like the soundtrack for a film you've never seen. You can tune in and out of it and even its cover looks like something you would see advertising a movie. The whole thing feels pretty cold and distant, until on track, "MORE," the mood swings into upbeat territory before crashing again.

VICE's Yudhistira Agato spoke with Dylan about what why it's hardest to forgive yourself.

VICE: Why an album about forgiving yourself?
Dylan Amirio: I’m someone who’s really hard on myself on everything I do and my interactions with people. I’m the kinda guy who goes “I should’ve done this, should’ve done that, I could’ve done this, could’ve done that.” There were so many memories that I went through that I didn’t really like. I hurt people and I could’ve done more for some. And it’s so easy to forget that you need to forgive yourself, to overcome every single regret that you have, to let go of every mistake you made to become a better person in the future. All our mistakes had to happen exactly as they did in order for us to learn.

What’s one mistake that you did that still haunts you today?
I had this aunt who I was very close to since I was a kid. She raised me… kind of. My parents weren’t absent or anything, but she played with me a lot. We connected on a very deep level from the time I was a kid until I was an adult.

So she lived in Melbourne, and when I went to University of Melbourne, eight years ago, I stayed at her house. I lived there for three years with her and her husband, but I was never really a good housemate to her. I wasn’t a good nephew to her either. I didn’t really hang out with her that much and I went out a lot. I didn’t try to maintain this connection that we had.

In 2016, she died. When she died, those thoughts came back to me, you know. She lost her life after struggling with drinking and mental illness. It sucked. I didn’t get over her death for two years, maybe I still haven't yet today. It’s these kind of memories that fuel some of the mood in my music. The ninth track on the album, “Pause Gauze” is dedicated to her. Sonically, it’s about her. A month after her death, I stuck together a few samples like I always do, and I ended finishing that track in 4 to 5 days. Before I put it on the album, I sent it to the Headspace compilation by Tandem Tapes, a charity compilation dedicated to mental illness. The money from the comp went to this charity in Australia that deals with mental health. At that moment, I thought, "OK this is perhaps the moment I could do something meaningful with this experience."

It sounds like guilt plays a big part on your music.
People deal with guilt differently. My way is I brood about it a lot to the point that I can’t really move or do anything else. That’s why when I’m sad, I can’t cry, because that’s not how I express myself. I just brood and go silent. That’s how I do it. Other people may know immediately what to do about it, or they don’t think about it that much. It’s sort of a blessing to have that kind of mechanism.

How do you convey certain feelings or emotions through instrumental music?
I rely purely on instinct. It’s the experiences and the memories that drove the topics of Forgive Yourself. There were times when these thoughts didn’t leave my head at all. I’ve been described by my good friends as someone who likes to torture myself internally. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the way I can try to make myself feel less tortured or get rid of this habit, is to pour it all into one album. There are some songs that are planned, but mostly I rely on instinct. When I think about memories and regrets and all that, I don’t necessarily go straight to my laptop. It festers a while until I have the right mood to actually go and make something out of it.

How did you get into electronic music?
I was a metalhead, basically. A smart-ass, teenage metalhead. We called people poseurs and stuff [Laughs]. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I started getting into electronic music, but it was probably in college. l started with Radiohead, Kid A, Amnesiac, brilliant albums. For a while, they were the only "electronic" I listened to.

There was also The Faint. So I started with artists that still had an indie rock sound, not full-on electronic. My new circle of friends were very open-minded about music. They were pretty laidback, and I started going to clubs with them. A friend also taught me how to make electronic music on the lasptop. One artist that was instrumental to my shift was The Gaslamp Killer, the L.A-based beatmaker. He was unlike any other electronic artist I had heard at that time. I was like, "holy fuck, who’s this guy?" He inspired me through this weird music. I saw him perform, and instead of visuals, he had all these walls lighting up. It changed my life. He was my gateway into Flying Lotus, another big one for me. Anything on Brainfeeder, Thundercat, and also Midnight Juggernauts.

Your generation grew up on social media. Do you see it as something negative or not?
Social media is just entertainment to me. Twitter, for me, is just this trash can where I can put my disposable thoughts. But it’s also a place where you dream, “Oh, this kind of life is actually the one I want," or "I wish I could be more like this." I read a lot of music media, and about all these artists being on tour, on stage, reaching stardom really fast. Not everyone can do that, for sure, but there’s this feeling of "Oh, I want my life to be more like like that." So social media doesn’t really bother me. All my problems started internally.

It seems like a lot of young Indonesian artists tend to adopt a more “global” approach to their music, complete with lyrics and song titles in English. Why is that?
I guess it’s natural progression of things. Younger Indonesians are more globalized and more aware of the outside world. They’re inspired more by international artists than local ones. It’s like natural feedback. You make music that resonates with you.

All of Indonesian electronic and hip-hop artists, especially the younger ones, and especially in Jakarta, they don’t look inward. They look outward, because that’s where the standards are, that’s where the quality is. It’s natural. It’s a good thing that you can’t tell where an artist is from these days, that means there’s no difference. It takes a lot of effort and X-factor to break out with your language overseas. People have done it. Senyawa, Sigur Ros, and Rammstein have all done it. But Indonesia… the world doesn’t see Indonesia as a significant country, at all. So, I guess one way an artist can go outside… they have to speak in English to connect with people around the world. It’s what happened with Rich Brian. People didn’t really know he was Indonesian until they read about it. People thought he was from the US. That’s a good thing, because there’s this universality within younger minds that they want to be a musical figure in the world, not just in Indonesia. Of course, it doesn’t mean people who sing in Indonesian are inferior or anything. People make music through their own means and their own intentions. It doesn’t lessen their quality, necessarily. It’s just an observation that I make.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.