Dustin O’Halloran – Queen City Sounds and Art

Dustin O’Halloran, photo courtesy the artist

The expanded edition of the reissue of Dustin O’Halloran’s 2011 album Lumière will be released June 12, 2026 via Splinter Records. With that fifteenth anniversary expanded presentation there are three previously unheard tracks of that era including “Fragile N.1.” The latter features O’Halloran’s gift for compositions that combine organic sounds in a modern classical mode with electronic tones and production methods. The song is both quietly majestic and filled with a sense of wonder with a touch of melancholic tone. But the whole run time one feels a sense of hopefulness, the kind expressed in the title, and one worth preserving and taking into one’s psyche. The minimal piano, textural string sounds and warm synth melody combine to great cinematic effect, fitting for a piece whose ideas were explored while O’Halloran was working on the score to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. It may seem counter-intuitive to say the song has a palpable gentleness but that is the salient quality of song throughout. Listen to “Fragile N.1” on YouTube and follow Dustin O’Halloran at the links below.

Dustin O’Halloran on Twitter

Dustin O’Halloran on Facebook

Dustin O’Halloran on Instagram

“Gold” was recorded in one take by Dustin O’Halloran in his studio in Reykjavik, Iceland. The member of A Winged Victory for the Sullen captured the intimacy of just him at his piano and natural resonances and reverb without removing the physicality of the instrument and its moving parts heard in the recording nor punching in any “mistakes” in the performance or the intonation the can change when you’re using analog instrumentation. The result is the essence of what it would be like to be there and experience the lingering progression, the chords sounding out and trailing off before being replaced by the next set of sounds. O’Halloran’s accents and minimal arrangement lend the pastoral piece a quietly majestic quality that is adjacent to melancholy but is more reflective as though concentrating on and taking in moments of pure tranquility separate from the press of mediated information that clutters up so much of modern life unless you take the time to disconnect and prioritize life and experience as we had it more than a decade ago and can still have it if we indulge our capacity for grace and patience to benefit our inner psychological spaces and not fill it with maximized and monetized content.