Artist Profile: Nik Dandelion

Nik Dandelion, the German-born and Barcelona-based indie artist, has been imbibed with a profound sense of acoustic rawness and sonic interplay since the earliest roots of his creative formation, and, since he has forged out a path as a solo artist in the past few years, has found himself with more and more of a passion for experimentation, crafting simultaneously sublime and haunting tracks that exist in a sort of subliminally curious plane of sound.

As a child, Nik did not grow up in a particularly musical family, and he has little memory of even possessing a musical consciousness until he had reached his early teenage years. Yet, when he picked up a guitar for the first time after seeing a movie that inspired him to do so, something immediately clicked in his brain.

Although he quit the lessons he was taking after just a few months, he fell to spending hours and hours teaching himself to play in his room, and, in conjunction with this budding passion, he began to delve deeper into the various artists he felt that same immediate affinity towards. Most influential among these artists was Bob Dylan, whose rawness and honesty in sound and lyricism rapidly appealed to Nik.

“I was 16 years old, and my English was not so good. I think I didn't even get most of the lyrics; it was just a feeling: just like this raw, singer-songwriter feeling…”

Yet, when Nik got his first musical opportunity, it was in a band he formed with his friend that played more ‘60s, group-oriented rock, and he was forced to conform his abilities to the fresh demands that this group presented him with. However, after playing a number of gigs in his hometown, he and his friend ultimately made the move to Berlin, a cultural hub of music in Central Europe, and, once there, the soundscapes of indie music began to creep into their tastes and their output.

While Nik had not necessarily been a conscious fan of the strung-out guitar and reverb-shimmering landscapes of indie music in the past, acts like Mac Demarco and Connan Mockasin slowly began to open his eyes to the possibilities the genre held enclosed within its jeweled heart. As these influences began to take hold, the band took on a more psychedelic bent, and, in this period, Nik began to feel out the potential that his own creative energy, paired with his continually progressing guitar skills, held.

Therefore, when the band split up just prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Nik felt ready to take on the mantle of a solo artist, being more than poised to manifest the ideas that had formed as his musical consciousness had expanded. He went to study music at BIMM University in Berlin, and, as he gained more formal knowledge, his budding garden of ideas begged to be harvested.

His first songs and his first EP represented a learning period for the young artist. While he was used to playing in a band setting, building off of his own guide tracks, and having the creative process be a purely singular experience, were largely foreign concepts to him. 

“I didn't know sh*t about production or anything like that… everything's scratching and creaking… But I think I captured these ideas, just sitting in front of the computer, playing along with myself,  just trying to find parts for the song and arrange the song in a way that I thought was cool or made sense. That's still something that I like about it.”

While “DANDY” did represent his earliest attempts to create a cohesive body of work, it is, ironically, polished (at least in the traditional sense) compared to his newest EP. While his production capabilities have progressed exponentially, the bolder choices that Nik has taken on “¡ALiGN!”, his 2024 effort, preview a further development in his sound: a return to the rawness of his musical roots while maintaining the psychedelic artistic choices that have defined his sound to this point.

“It seems like it's one track, but it's actually one on the left and one on the right… I think it's a bolder Nik, making production choices and recording on tape and stuff like that. So there's definitely a continuation and a progress.”