On his new album, Jakarta-based electronic musician Dylan Amirio looks inward for inspiration.

While his 2015 debut Runaway established a sound that mixed various types of electronica with a melancholy aesthetic, his new album Forgive Yourself is a more-thematic collection of songs, both emotionally and musically.

Again using the musical moniker of Logic Lost, Dylan dives deep into his psyche for the album, finding it a place filled with plenty of emotional baggage and ramifications. It is an album filled with empathy and honesty, and is clearly a stronger record than its predecessor.

The music follows suit, in an optimistic way. Melodies still roam within a bittersweet landscape but the textures feel more uplifting, with soaring moments in the synthesizer works and vocal choices. They go through areas that feel cinematic and more visually evocative, with pulses of electronic beats playing a major part in the songs’ dynamics. Tracks like “The First Thing I See” and “Silence in a Living Morning” act like film scores in the way they use a centerpiece of distant pianos and angelic synthesizer patches to create dreamy aural landscapes.

With help from a notable number of fellow musicians and creative minds such as Tesla Manaf, Tini Bohang, and Hany Nur Fajrina, Forgive Yourself works as a medium of self-healing for its creator. And it feels good to bear witness to the process. Some songs even feel like they could soundtrack a meditation session.

Logic Lost’s openness in approaching music makes it clear how Dylan is willing to open up.

“The theme of self-doubt I think exists in any personal work I make, so I don’t think it will ever go away,” he says, laughing but without hesitance.

While he has no qualms talking and writing about these things, for Forgive Yourself, Dylan wanted to hone in on some deep issues.

“For this album, I looked specifically at my experiences over the last five to eight years or so. Those years are probably the most formative years of my life, and the years when I felt I made the mistakes that would change me for the better,” he says.

These were not things he sang about much on his debut. But this time he felt confident he could pull of bringing those issues onto the table with grace and enough hindsight. He was ready to bring introspection into the public forum.

“The way I wrote my songs on this album was that I recalled these feelings and therefore, felt them the same way again,” he says, though “Revisiting all those regrets was hard, and it really put a toll on me.”

All these things announce themselves directly through the album title. Which Dylan calls “a personal mantra to me to reflect on what I did or didn’t do in the past and moving on and learning from those mistakes so that I can become a better person today and in the future.”

Indeed, regret is a theme here, and the album seems to follow a trajectory of self-blame toward something that resembles acceptance. Though he does not address anything specific, Dylan suggests the title was as literal as could be, and that he has come to peace with past mistakes made.

He sighs and commiserates, “I’m not saying that I am justifying my actions, I mean, I’m sure that the people who felt hurt by things I did may still feel awful today when they remember it, and they’d still probably hate me today. That’s fine though. What I can do now is to be aware of where I went wrong and try little by little to improve myself from there so I don’t stay the same person I was a few years ago.”

The feelings he felt in the past few years were, Dylan says, an “amalgamation of things such as loneliness, anxiety, insecurity, self-doubt, assumptions and sometimes, straight up suicidal [thoughts].”

While he refers to his debut as an album where a lot of sounds were used to make up for a centralized theme, the production of Forgive Yourself was easier. Dylan knew how he wanted to the album to sound, and he wanted it to “define” him.

“I sought to make it a personal record, recalling and forming those sounds was easier because it just came out naturally.”

Sonically, he says the album finds him finally knowing what his “sound” truly is. Taking inspiration from his musical idols Boards of Canada and Jon Hopkins, he was finally able to mold his influences into something that pays homage to those artists but still resonates with originality.

Forgive Yourself acted as a venting machine for Dylan, and he could not be more relieved. He likens it to casting all those issues aside.

“It felt like I threw up years of regret in two years straight. But after that finished, I suddenly felt that I no longer had any of those feelings of regret or ‘what I could have done’ feelings that gripped me during the whole two years of the album’s creation. It was all gone.”

Disclaimer: Dylan Amirio is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.

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