Dilian, also known under the GAP alias, is an electronic musician from Brooklyn, which blends the extremes: a music composer for children movies, a music composer for documentaries, a producer, a dj, a live performer with an extremely hectic schedule - he has not only played most venues in the New York area, but he also regularly tours Europe, where he carried out a long tour mixing DJ and live sets, right before the Coronavirus madness started to take form. And, finally, he is also part of the Int’l Winners Collective, as well as a radio host on London’s Threads Radio and Montreal n10.as.
Blending the extremes is also the musical direction for Dilian’s House of 90 Portents, his latest record on SØVN Records. The sheer abundance of samples used is quite imposing - and the most striking characteristic of the blend is how each sample manages to live in a space both in and out of the mix. The lack of a unitary solution to the problem posed by the coexistence all the samples is not a problem, but rather a fascinating side of House of 90 Portents: the pieces clearly don’t fit, just like the pieces of some kid’s game, but the emerging impressions are much more interesting.
Dilian’s music oscillates between Oneohtrix Point Never, an obvious reference, and the rhytmic excesses of footwork or Duke’s incredibly fast-paced work on Nyege Nyege Tapes. Of the former, it eschews both the nostalgia and the grand narrative scope; of the latter, it captures the energy without falling for the minimalistic adoration of repetition. With its lack of evident structure, House of 90 Portents never ceases to surprise: be it when moving from a EDM-esque build up to the least consequential sample as in Esca, or when developing to an electro-acoustic synthesized sequence at the end of Pin. It somehow summarizes all of Dilian’s facets: it’s a dj-set, a children film soundtrack, a live set, a studio record, a radio broadcast, all cut into small samples and blended together.
Cacophonous mash of noise, electronic sounds and vocals powered by energetic walls of drums. Listen loud, jump often. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 28, 2014