Dillon

Dillon merges a delicate vocal delivery and confessional singer/songwriter drive with the exacting structures of electronic production. An online video channel first built her audience, after which she moved onto festival bills and issued her opening full-length, This Silence Kills, in 2011. Her third album, Kind, from 2017, wove brass and woodwind instruments into expansive arrangements for striking results, while the spectral yet rhythm-focused 6abotage surfaced in 2023.

Although born in São Paulo, Brazil, Dillon—full name Dominique Dillon de Byington—grew up in Cologne, Germany, beginning at age five. Still a teenager, she taught herself piano, wrote poetry, and uploaded self-made performance clips of her earliest material to YouTube; the clips attracted an internet following that led directly to her initial live appearance in Cologne. Subsequent shows included a shared bill with Tocotronic and a slot at the Melt! Festival. By the time her debut EP, Ludwig, appeared on Combination Records in 2008, she had relocated to Berlin.

Dillon joined the techno-pop outfit Coma for the 2011 single “Aiming for Destruction,” later included on BPitch Control’s Werkschau compilation. For her first album she enlisted Thies Mynther of Phantom Ghost and Tamer Fahri Özgönenc of MIT, entering a Hamburg studio once a month from November 2010 through April 2011 so the spontaneity of her demos could survive in the finished takes. BPitch issued This Silence Kills in November 2011; the finger-snapping ballad “Thirteen ThirtyFive” quickly became a signature track and accumulated millions of streams. After several European tours she returned with the stylistically consistent follow-up, The Unknown, released on BPitch in March 2014. A live recording from 2016, Live at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, captured her first two albums performed with a 16-piece choir and marked, in her view, the close of one creative period.

Following her move to PIAS, Dillon delivered the third studio album, Kind, in November 2017. Cut in Berlin with Tamer Fahri Özgönenc, Samuel Savenberg, and Teengirl Fantasy’s Nick Weiss, the record introduced brass and other acoustic elements to her airy electronic backdrops. PIAS also released the largely beat-free, keyboard-centered EP When Breathing Feels Like Drowning in early 2019; Alexis Troy helped shape the sonic turn. Around the same time Dillon composed music for a Hamburg Thalia Theater production of Hamlet and gave birth to her first child, just before the COVID-19 pandemic halted touring and much of the wider arts community in early 2020.

Dillon rejoined BPitch Control for her fourth album, approaching the project with a celebratory outlook and a sharpened emphasis on dancefloor-ready production even though she wrote, self-produced, and recorded everything in total seclusion. The resulting 6abotage reached stores on the label in October of 2022.