Can I start with your full name, age, and occupation?

Dustin: I am Dustin O’Halloran and I am a musician.

Adam: I’m Adam Wiltzie.

Dustin: We’re musicians.

I guess that is the question: are you musicians, composers or artists? How would you differentiate between them?

Adam: It’s all a bit blurry. I just call myself an artist. I do express myself in any number of different ways, so it is fine. I don’t really want to classify it. I’m not too precious about it.

Given your classical background, how would you classify yourself Dustin?

Dustin: You know, I never really thought about it. I always felt strange to call myself a composer because there are composers that I put in such high esteem. At the end of the day, I think that's what I like to do. I mean, I think that’s what I enjoy the most; I enjoy playing music, but it is more of the creation of music that I enjoy the most. So, for lack of a better term, I would say I am a composer.

You mentioned that you hold a few composers in high regard. What were your musical interests when you were both growing up in Los Angeles and New York?

Dustin: Well, it's been a long time. I've gone through a lot of musical journeys. I started playing piano, you know, playing Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach. Through my teen years I was listening to a lot of rock, experimental, and punk rock. I had a band for a long time called Dēvics and we put out 5 records. We were together for over 20 years and did a lot of touring all over the world. So, I kind of came back to composition sort of later in life, I guess. I listen to so much variety of music at this point in my life. I'm probably at a point of my life where it is the first time when I'm not listening to music because I am working on so much music. It is just about sitting in my studio and just trying to make discoveries on my own.

Why did you both move to Europe?

Adam: Better quality of life for me.

Dustin: I moved to Europe to make an album with Dēvics. I moved to Italy and then I ended up getting married and so I ended up staying in Italy for 7 years.

Was that in Bologna?

Dustin: It was near Bologna. It's a good city. It's cool. You know, it's not as touristy as so many other cities, which makes it more interesting. People have this idea of Italy. They want to see Venice and Florence, but, you know, Italy is a big place with amazing people.

Let’s talk about your project, A Winged Victory for the Sullen. Is the project trying to reform classical music or ambient music?

Adam: I would say that we’re just trying to make some music that just comes naturally. I think this classification is what you do. You, the journalist, need to classify it, but we just like to make music that we like to make. There is no precondition.

Dustin: Both of us have been making records for about 20 years. What we're doing together is a culmination of our entire musical history. Adam has been working with a lot of guitar sound for a long time and developing this really special sound. And I was doing piano music, you know, even before I ever heard the term neoclassical or anything. That was just something I was doing on my own. I think this is kind of a timing thing. Ultimately, these are things that we have been working on and that has been absorbing for a really, really long time. We’re just seeking out sounds that are interesting to us. There’s no script or any pre-definition of what we want to do. We’re just following the news.

Adam: Every time you do something, you’re evolving a little bit. It doesn’t matter if we met each other at this point in time. I think it is just a coincidence that this is how it sounds.

Dustin: The beginning of this project was with Wayne McGregor. It was part of a dance piece and he gave us this sort of heavy concept about atoms, the formation of atoms and inner space, and outer space and the universe, and the building of atoms. We were inspired by that and we were trying to find the language to explain this concept. That’s what we were following. It wasn’t ever about trying to push genre. We’re literally just trying to find the sounds that we’re interested in and that can help translate those concepts, wherever we find them.

What would you say to a music journalist that is trying to pinpoint your sounds? I know you’ve talked…

Adam: You know, it is kind of what you have to do. It’s your job and that’s fine.

Dustin: We leave that to other people. Depending on where you are in the world and who is listening, everyone's going to have a different take on it. Our job is to make music and try to make something honest and try to find their own sound that’s original. In my mind, I hope that what we do sounds like us and that is something that we are creating in a world that people can live in. Some of my favorite records are indefinable records. The artists that I love are these artists that sort of live in their own space and it's a culmination of a lot of things, but ultimately it's these worlds that are created and those are really precious albums and really precious music to me.

Adam: Mixing extremes and all this stuff is something that been happening since the mid-nineties. It’s not like it just happened last week. So, I think it’s just that this time it’s become a little bit trendy and maybe that’s the talking point. But in the end, it is just a piece a record.

Dustin: I would say that the only thing me and you can say is if you want to call it something, you can call it contemporary. It's Also a goal of the New you could say you could if you want to call it something, you can call it contemporary. What do you call Gavin Bryars?

Adam: All of this is contemporary.

Dustin: Yeah, I mean contemporary is the only thing that I would use.