Plini: The Architect Who (Happily) Failed

Steve Vai once called Plini's music some of the finest modern guitar work he'd heard. Plini's own account of his qualifications is rather different: "I left high school as a relatively blank slate of a personality — aside from liking Dream Theater," he laughs in his Thomann interview. Then came architecture school, "which failed — which is a good thing, because now I'm a musician."

The failure left fingerprints. Architecture school, he says, shaped how he builds records — projects, iteration, competitive critique. The albums do sound designed: sections load-bearing, nothing ornamental.

The most modern thing about Plini isn't the tone — it's the org chart. "It started off writing for myself, because there wasn't a band. I would program all the other instruments… I wanted to hear a band with riffs." The band came later, assembled around finished music: the exact inversion of how every previous generation of guitar bands formed.

He's funny about where he sits among his peers, too — describing his approach as hearing what Tosin and Animals as Leaders do and thinking: "Oh, that's too hard though. So I'm going to give those parts to my bass player, drummer and other guitarist, and then I'm going to play my simple jazz Satriani melody over the top." False modesty, delivered in 11/8.

The touring setup for one of prog's most acclaimed live acts: "It's just a Quad Cortex that's MIDI-controlled. One for me, one for Jake the guitarist, one for Simon the bass player. My front-of-house engineer started using one as well, running some of the drums through phases and delays."

No refrigerator racks, no amp wall — the sound of a genre that grew up rendering tones on laptops and never developed the hardware romance. The bedroom producer aesthetic, scaled to theatres.