New Dorian: “Silent Hill”

How Dorian’s new album Midori got lost in the 2013 shuffle isn’t clear, but it did…part of the problem might have been the fact no full-length audio of any of the album’s tracks appeared until the end of January 2014 (a sampler had been released, but a minute of material isn’t enough to really dig into). Turns out a gem might have been missed, or at least one excellent song was. Up until this point, Dorian has been associated with the City Pop revival, and he’s become a go-to producer for Hitomi (he appears several times on her new full-length Snowbank Social Club). This sorta forced Dorian into a corner as that City-Pop guy, even if it was a reputation he didn’t always deserve. Maybe that’s why Midori breezed by…easy to forget about something you think you’ve already heard.

Welp, turns out that was a dumb thought. “Silent Hill” hints at a new direction for Dorian, one where he steps away from the nostaligia-dunked sound he came to attention for in favor of tropical sampledelica. Beach-side stuff has always been in his arsenal, but here Dorian is getting a bit more abstract and less in-your-face poppy. It’s one of his sparsest constructions to date, the steel drum adding the mandatory island flavor, but the twinkling piano loops and fuzzy vocal samples take this somewhere else. Whereas before Dorian trained his eyes on the club (possibly the club located in 1980s Japan), here he lets his music float. Listen above.