Dillon

Dillon – The Unknown (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 43:28 minutes | 434 MB | Genre: Electronic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BPitch Control

To fully indulge in Dillon’s fragile second album is to completely submit yourself to, as the title intimates, The Unknown. From the foreboding bassline and perturbing white noise of the titular opener until the album’s close, The Unknown feels like uncharted territory. Its mysterious splendor is initially concealed beneath a cold exterior like a windswept moor hidden under a blanket of mist. Only with time and patience will its true beauty emerge. On Dillon’s critically lauded 2011 debut album This Silence Kills, the Brazilian songwriter gracefully echoed the “chanson-pop” melodies of Lykke Li and Emiliana Torrini. Yet The Unknown reveals that Dillon has undergone a significant musical transformation. Unlike her debut, the silence no longer kills but instead breaths life into The Unknown’s twelve astonishing tracks.

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Dillon – Live at Haus der Berliner Festspiele (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 59:04 minutes | 639 MB | Genre: Electronic, Indie Pop, Experimental
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BPitch Control

Born in Brazil, raised in Cologne and based in Berlin, Dominique Dillon de Byington, aka Dillon, has always had a clear vision of her art. She already has two albums under her belt, and she actually regards these as part of the same work, since they tell a coherent story. This has always been apparent in her live shows, which are carried by a magical interchange between the dark-melodic songs of both albums. When the Berlin Foreign Affairs Festival asked her, in 2015, to develop a unique concert idea, she decided on a performance with a six-piece women’s choir, which accompanied her and Tamer Fahri Özgönenc, her collaborator and co-producer of her first two albums, in the live performance at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in July 2015. “I felt the need to work with vocals and to create an additional layer that breathes in this space between the electronic music and myself. I was very attracted to this idea, so Tamer and I wrote and arranged the choir parts together,” Dillon explains. The choir injects a new physical layer into her music, which is dominated by piano and electronic sounds, and her own voice dances longingly in this space. The newly released live recording of the concert reveals just how naturally this new element slots into her dramatically minimal music. “When I started writing my new album The Unknown I already knew it would be a continuation of This Silence Kills in terms of both music and content. Now the two albums are being brought together as a release, as well as in the live shows. For me, this album could be called This Silence Kills The Unknown, the 28-year-old reveals. A film of the concert at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele is being released alongside the live album. And in 2017 this will be followed by a third studio album, this time entirely separate from the works that came before, which Dillon herself describes as an “album of love”.

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Dillon – Kind (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 34:58 minutes | 340 MB | Genre: Electronic, Experimental, Indie, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © [PIAS] Recordings Germany

What Dominique Dillon de Byington is more afraid of: Skydiving or writing songs? In the video for her current single “Shades Fade”, the Brazilian singer leaps daring out of a plane into a sea of ​​clouds. No sign of doubt or fear. The lyrics for their second album, The Unknown were for Dillon, however, a ragging with themselves, sometimes real ordeal.

On the successor child you can not feel it anymore. The sound is still melancholic, sometimes even apathetic, and Dillon’s voice still sounds like a constant cold. But the songwriter, singer and pianist more often trusts her spontaneous inspirations. “The Present” seems to have been recorded in the home garden. At the beginning you hear the beep of a smartphone dictaphone, then Dillon improvises a vocal melody. In the background: birdsong.

The rest of the arrangements are much more through-produced, though they remain committed to a minimalist approach. This is especially true for the Opener with Dirk von Lowtzow breathed. Like this one, “Stem & Leaf” presents sombre brass, while the polyglot “Lullaby” plays with percussion and suggests skeletonized electronica in pieces like “Contact Us” club music. “If you do not dance, I do not sing,” says Dillon here. On Kind she makes a sublime development: In the end, she asserted herself in the second part of the title track against pounding drums and technoid layered synth loops. Dillon does not have to worry about his own failure. Who dismisses her as an Epigonin of Lykke Li, just did not listen properly.

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