Diorama interview: ‘The promises of modern technology become something like a devourer of light’
Diorama (Photo by Karo Kratochwil)
With A Substitute for Light, Diorama return in a form that feels both immediately recognizable and newly sharpened. The album carries everything that has long made the band distinct, melancholy in motion, philosophical tension, emotional precision, and melodies that make unease strangely luminous, yet it does so with a clearer, leaner, more focused impact. Beneath its elegant surfaces lies a record preoccupied with absence, longing, digital distortion, and the increasingly hollow promises of modern life. In this interview, Torben Wendt speaks about the album’s inner climate, the uneasy search for illumination, the seductive tonality of despair, and the way these songs are already beginning to transform once they step on stage.
Diorama interview
Q: When you released Tiny Missing Fragments, you spoke about preserving a certain “magic” that holds Diorama together beyond questions of tempo, instrumentation, or genre. On A Substitute for Light, that magic seems to return in a sharper and more paradoxical form, because light itself appears as promise, guidance, deception, and replacement. At this stage in your life, what made light more urgent to think about than darkness?
Torben Wendt: Oh, I don’t focus on light itself that much, rather on strategies to deal with its absence, in a symbolic sense. What keeps you moving forward when you know your goal can never be reached? What makes you hold on to a love that can’t exist, and that feels both ultimately meaningless and inescapable? It seems like the right time has arrived to confront questions like these.
Q: The album title is beautifully uneasy. A substitute can comfort, deceive, protect, numb, or simply stand in for something real that is missing. Did you conceive this record as a search for illumination, or as a meditation on the false forms of illumination that modern life keeps offering us instead?
Torben Wendt: It’s both, actually. Embedded in the exhausting and ultimately unsuccessful search for a kind of illumination, understood as being held, finding reassurance, etc., lies the realization that the promises of modern technology are not capable of filling the void. On the contrary, they themselves become something like a devourer of light.
Q: A Substitute for Light feels, in a way, like a later chapter in the philosophical terrain Diorama have explored for years: absence, memory, fragmentation, longing, and the unstable architectures of the self. Do you feel continuity between this album and your earlier work, or does it come from a fundamentally different inner climate?
Torben Wendt: I tend to see the album as a continuation of an ongoing story, as the continuity of everyday life is also an inspirational dimension of its own, through its relentless pace and the narrow room it leaves for self-fulfillment. It reflects a desperate longing for a radical break or new beginning that never really comes, and if it ever did, you already know it would only arrive half-heartedly or in a clumsy, improvised, unsatisfying way.
Q: The album speaks of discarded love and digital paralysis, which suggests a record concerned not only with emotion, but with consciousness under pressure, with what technology does to memory, desire, and attention. Were you trying to write from inside that condition, or against it?
Torben Wendt: Again, it’s both. Drowning while simultaneously observing, documenting, analyzing, maybe even somewhat celebrating, the process of drowning.
Q: Diorama have always had a rare ability to make melancholy move, to give sadness rhythm, lift, and even seduction without weakening its seriousness. On this album, how consciously did you think about the relationship between emotional heaviness and melodic immediacy? When does beauty intensify pain, and when does it make pain bearable?
Torben Wendt: It’s an important characteristic of the album, a development we enjoyed increasingly throughout the creative process: the emergence of a light, fluid, catchy and thus comparatively digestible, at least for Diorama, tonality for expressing deeply unsettling emotional states and reflections. This sense of accessibility, along with brutalist self-irony and escapist thoughts, kind of softens and beautifies the void we’re drifting through, making it more comfortable.
Q: A Substitute for Light suggests a more reduced approach: clearer arrangements, stronger melodic focus, less excess, more impact. That kind of reduction can be a sign of maturity, though it can also be risky because there is less to hide behind. Did this album ask for a new kind of discipline from you?
Torben Wendt: The stylistic direction was an organic development. During the first productions, hence songs like “No Complications” and “More Gold,” this clearer, more focused vibe became noticeable and immediately felt right. This, in turn, influenced the design of the subsequent tracks. It’s often difficult and requires consistency to maintain the chosen stylistic path until the result matches what you hear in your mind’s ear. This involves the art of eventually leaving behind beloved sound elements, balancing conceptual ideas on one hand and pure, untamed creativity on the other. But in the end, it’s beautiful when an album gains its own character and distinctiveness in this way. For us and the people who care.
Q: Titles like “No Complications,” “More Gold,” “Million Dollar Smile,” “The Same Ghost,” “Losing Your Coordinates,” and “Weird Physics” hint at a world that is psychologically unstable, ironic, seductive, and disoriented all at once. When the tracklist came together, did you feel you were building a sequence of songs, or mapping a condition of being?
Torben Wendt: It’s all about mapping, all the time. We’re describing states of mind, emotions, dilemmas, contradictions, desires, and so on. This comes through in the songs, which act like waypoints on a massive roadmap, expanding it more or less with each one. The map itself still doesn’t offer any direction, but I guess that’s not really the point.
Q: Diorama have already brought some of this material to the stage in 2026, which means the songs have begun their second life in front of an audience. What have they revealed about themselves live so far, and has that experience awakened the desire to take this album further on stage in the months ahead?
Torben Wendt: The songs have turned out to be super energetic and great for interacting with the audience. We never felt the need to hide or overly dress up the new tracks to play it safe. From the get-go, they’ve felt like highlights in the setlist. With “No Complications,” it’s always surprising how slow the track actually is. It takes about 5–10 seconds to really process that, but then it grooves all the way to Beijing. 🙂
During the last pre-album tour, we mainly focused on the singles that came before the album, but for upcoming solo shows, we’re planning to expand the range of songs, which we’re really looking forward to. The ballad “Ruling My World” could, for example, be interesting. The emotional state on stage makes it possible to connect again with the imaginary person or persons in the song’s “home port,” from a fragile, unique, and exposed moment. I’m curious to see what kind of meaning the song will take on for different people and what kind of resonance we’ll be able to pick up.
Q: These 2026 dates place the new material in very different settings: club shows, festival stages, and international contexts. Do you experience those as variations of one Diorama audience, or do different cities and environments still draw different emotional colours out of the songs?
Torben Wendt: While the songs are still part of that same Diorama universe, the settings definitely bring out different sides of them. There are songs that, from our perspective, work particularly well in a club setting, and others that are more suited for festivals. Each place has its own vibe, the number of people in the audience varies, and that really impacts how the songs function and resonate back to the band on stage.
Q: Years ago, you gave a beautiful answer about maps being outdated the moment one begins to draw them, and yet still worth drawing, with love. Looking at A Substitute for Light now, do you feel you are still mapping the world, or increasingly mapping the distortions through which the world reaches us?
Torben Wendt: Referring to A Substitute for Light, distortion is inseparable from the world that is perceived. The digital filters that permeate everything, the technological progress that overwhelms us, the big middle finger that AI and its creators are holding up to us. The urge to fight through, to preserve a piece of naivety and naturalness, or to become the lighthouse keeper of Tridrangar. It’s all on the same map. And, to quote one of the album tracks, we’re on a journey. We’ll be arriving soon.
Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.
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