Biography

Dillon combines a fragile voice and singer/songwriter passion with the precision of electronic music. She first won a following with her online video channel before moving to festival stages and releasing her debut album, This Silence Kills, in 2011. Her third effort, 2017's Kind, incorporated brass and woodwind instruments into her spacious sound to dramatic effect, and the ghostly yet dance-oriented 6abotage materialized in 2023. Born in São Paulo, Brazil but raised in Cologne, Germany from the age of five, Dillon -- aka Dominique Dillon de Byington -- began making music when she was still in her teens. Self-taught on piano and a writer of poetry, she began posting homemade performance videos of her early songs on YouTube that gained an online following and ultimately led to her first show in Cologne. From there, Dillon shared the stage with Tocotronic and also performed at the Melt! Festival. She was based in Berlin by the time she released her debut EP, Ludwig, on Combination Records in 2008. In 2011, Dillon collaborated with the techno-pop group Coma on the single "Aiming for Destruction," which was featured on the BPitch Control compilation Werkschau in 2011. For her debut album, she worked with Thies Mynther of Phantom Ghost and Tamer Fahri Özgönenc of the collective MIT. She and her producers went into the studio in Hamburg monthly from November 2010 to April 2011, giving them time to keep the freshness of Dillon's demos in the final performances. BPitch released the completed This Silence Kills in November 2011. The finger-snapping ballad "Thirteen ThirtyFive" became one of her signature songs, amassing millions of streams. She did multiple tours across Europe before returning with her similarly styled sophomore outing, The Unknown. It arrived on BPitch in March 2014. A concert album, 2016's Live at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, featured her performing songs from her first two albums with a 16-piece choir. She considered this the end of a musical chapter. After signing with PIAS, Dillon released her third studio LP, Kind, in November 2017. Recorded in Berlin with Tamer Fahri Özgönenc, Samuel Savenberg, and Teengirl Fantasy's Nick Weiss, it added instruments including brass to her spacious electronic soundscapes. PIAS also delivered her keyboard-based, nearly beats-free EP When Breathing Feels Like Drowning in early 2019. The shift in sound was partly inspired by meetings with Alexis Troy. Dillon also scored a production of Hamlet at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and gave birth to her first child before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down not only touring but much of the global art scene in early 2020. When Dillon returned to BPitch Control for her fourth album, it was with a celebratory spirit and a renewed focus on dance-friendly production, despite its having been written, self-produced, and recorded in complete isolation. The resulting 6abotage arrived on the label in October of 2022. ~ Marcy Donelson & Heather Phares, Rovi