Hello everyone, it’s your host Oliver from DULAXI, and today I’m delighted to be joined by Italian pianist and composer Niel Lian, the artist behind the solo piano album Resilience in a World on Fire. Based in Lucca, Italy, Lian brings together classical tradition and contemporary minimalism in a deeply personal body of work that explores fragility, distance, absence, belonging, fear, healing, identity, movement, gratitude, and the uncertain ways in which we continue moving through life.
Released on September 18, 2026, Resilience in a World on Fire is a twelve-track solo piano album that expands upon Lian’s 2025 debut EP of the same name. The album combines new compositions with pieces that first appeared on the EP, some of which were revisited and refined for this acoustic piano recording. Rather than treating resilience as heroic resistance, Lian approaches it as something quieter and more complicated: the ability to remain present, move through uncertainty, acknowledge fragility, and allow hope to exist without pretending that difficulty has disappeared.
Before we begin our conversation with Niel Lian, here’s what you need to know about today’s featured project.
About Niel Lian
Niel Lian’s musical path has grown from a foundation in classical piano training and later studies in modern composition. His musical language brings together the discipline and vocabulary of classical music with the repetition, movement, and emotional possibilities of contemporary minimalism. His influences include Chopin, Philip Glass, Wim Mertens, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Felix Rösch, and Peter Gabriel, although his approach has developed through a broader process of experimentation, composition, production, performance, and reflection.
That development is particularly visible in the way Lian describes his relationship with the piano. His classical background gave him a musical vocabulary, while his later encounters with minimalism opened possibilities for using that vocabulary differently. His interest in irregular rhythms has also become an important part of his compositional process, alongside his work with Stefano Giannotti, Michele Bargigia, and pianist Arianna Tarantino. These different encounters have contributed to a musical voice shaped by classical discipline, experimentation, psychological exploration, and the physical act of playing.
Resilience in a World on Fire grew from a project that was already substantially formed before the 2025 EP introduced part of it to listeners. Although the album was nearly complete by the end of 2023, its earlier compositions were gradually reconsidered as Lian sought to create a stronger shared narrative. What ultimately remained from the older material was limited, with only two previous piano compositions and one piece originally written for flute surviving into the album.
The 2025 EP became an initial window into the larger project, allowing Lian to receive feedback before continuing with the complete album. The response encouraged him to move forward, but the album itself was not simply an expanded version of a smaller release. Instead, the EP offered an early glimpse into a body of work that had already largely taken shape.
At the centre of the album is an exploration of the feelings that remain after experiences have passed. Lian describes the record almost as a long-exposure photograph of recent years, less concerned with documenting specific events than with preserving the feelings those experiences left behind. His distinction between emotions and feelings is important to the album’s structure. Where an emotion may belong to an immediate moment, a feeling can persist, change, accumulate different shades, and gradually form its own inner world.
Having this brief introduction to today’s featured project, I’m sure both new listeners and longtime fans are excited to hear directly from Niel. So, without further ado, let’s begin today’s interview.
INTERVIEW SESSION
Oliver:
Before we explore the album itself, tell us about the person behind Niel Lian. How did your classical piano training and later studies in modern composition shape the way you understand music, and what led you toward developing your own voice as a pianist and composer?
Niel Lian:
My classical training gave me discipline, knowledge and, of course, the ability to read increasingly complex music. I loved certain works by Bach and Beethoven, much of Chopin and, at different times, Debussy and Brahms. I was also particularly drawn to the theme-and-variations form. Ahead, Not Too Far, for instance, can be seen as a kind of freely conceived theme and variations.
For a long time, however, I searched for contemporary references that felt closer to the music I wanted to write, and gradually found them in minimalists such as Wim Mertens, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Classical training had given me a vocabulary—the words and phrases from which I could begin to compose—but these musicians helped me imagine how I might use it in my own way.
I had also always been fascinated by irregular rhythms, from Tubular Bells, Solsbury Hill and Supper’s Ready to the music of Philip Glass. When I began studying composition under the guidance of Stefano Giannotti, I experimented widely with rhythm, structure and different musical languages. Irregular metres became one of the means through which I could generate movement and variation in my own compositions.
In recent years, I have continued this path with Michele Bargigia, working on composition and production. Michele is also a psychologist, and this inevitably brings another dimension to our conversations about music. At the same time, my work with pianist Arianna Tarantino has helped me focus more closely on performance and interpretation. My own voice has gradually emerged from all these different encounters: classical discipline, experimentation, psychological exploration and the physical act of playing the piano.
Oliver:
Your music brings together classical tradition and contemporary minimalism, with influences ranging from Chopin and Philip Glass to Wim Mertens, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Felix Rösch, and the psychologically aware approach of Peter Gabriel. What do you take from such different artists, and how have those influences helped you develop a musical language of your own?
Niel Lian:
From Chopin, perhaps above all, I take the idea that the piano can sing. Rather appropriately, most of my pieces begin with the voice rather than the piano. My work usually keeps me away from the instrument, so recording small vocal sketches on my phone while I am out and about is often the only way to capture an idea before it disappears. I will spare your readers the various situations in which I have had to hide somewhere with my smartphone to record one. Only rarely does a piece begin with me sitting at the piano.
Minimalism interests me as much more than a source of patterns. I am especially drawn to the lyricism I find in some works by Philip Glass and Wim Mertens, and also in Nils Frahm. Repetition, for me, is not about remaining in the same place: it allows a musical idea to change gradually, almost imperceptibly, while preserving its identity. Max Richter has also shown me how a relatively economical musical language can sustain a strong emotional narrative.
Peter Gabriel is a different and perhaps broader kind of influence. I admire not only the psychological depth of his work, but also his social commitment and his ability to convey complex moral and political ideas through music. I think of the psychological isolation explored in Lead a Normal Life, the unease of Mother of Violence, and the engagement with imprisonment, oppression and obedience in Wallflower, Biko and We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37). The same commitment can be found in his involvement in WOMAD and in his film scores for Birdy and Rabbit-Proof Fence. In his work, music is never merely decorative: it becomes a way of entering another person’s experience and confronting violence, isolation and injustice without reducing them to simple messages. That combination of musical imagination, psychological awareness and social responsibility has profoundly influenced the way I think about what music can do.
Felix Rösch is a more recent discovery: I encountered his music after completing the album, so he cannot really be considered an influence on it. Yet, at this moment in my life, his work is perhaps what resonates most closely with my own path. I find him courageous in the way he uses music to engage with larger human questions. I love his work, and I hope one day to include some of his pieces in my own concert repertoire.
My musical language has grown from all these different elements: the singing quality of melody, repetition as transformation, emotional narrative and the need for music to confront something real.
Oliver:
“Resilience in a World on Fire” began as a shorter project before gradually expanding into a twelve-track album. What changed during that process that made you realise the story needed more space to unfold?
Niel Lian:
In fact, the album was already almost complete by the end of 2023. The original idea had been to combine approximately two-thirds older compositions with one-third new material. However, I feel a strong need to live and work in the present, and the earlier pieces had not been conceived as part of a shared narrative. In the end, only two older piano compositions survived, together with one piece originally written for flute.
I had intended to release at least the EP during the summer of 2024. I wanted it to provide an initial encounter with the project and to receive some feedback from friends and reviewers before completing the release of the album. A series of circumstances meant that I had neither the time nor the right state of mind to record it, so the EP was postponed until the summer of 2025.
The feedback was encouraging, and that gave me the confidence to continue with the complete album. The EP was therefore not really the beginning of a smaller project that subsequently expanded. It was a first window into a larger project that, for the most part, already existed.
Oliver:
The album challenges the conventional idea of resilience as heroic resistance, instead presenting it as the ability to remain present while moving through fear, uncertainty, healing, and fragility. What experiences shaped this understanding of resilience for you?
Niel Lian:
Like most people, I have been through difficult periods and have had to cultivate a form of inner strength. Music has always been one of the ways in which I reconnect with myself.
The experiences from which the album emerged, however, are not extraordinary: they are the distances we try to bridge, the absences we learn to live with, and the need to keep finding ways to grow. Later, when discussing the individual pieces, I will be more explicit about how some of these experiences entered the music.
I would also add the need to acknowledge and give direction to our less conciliatory feelings rather than suppressing them. I am reminded of a phrase by Giancarlo De Carlo, an architect and intellectual deeply engaged with society: “You need anger.” I do not believe that resilience is sustained by acceptance, serenity and hope alone. Anger, restlessness and the refusal to accept what should never become normal can also be transformed into energy—as long as they do not consume us, but instead drive us to respond and act.
Oliver:
The album explores fragility, distance, absence, belonging, identity, movement, and moments of light. How did you decide which of these experiences belonged together within the larger emotional world of the record?
Niel Lian:
I did not really decide that these experiences belonged together: they were already connected because they coexisted within the same period of my life. As I mentioned earlier, I feel a strong need to live in the present, and the album became a kind of long-exposure photograph of my recent years—not so much a record of events as of the feelings they left behind.
I make a personal distinction between emotions and feelings, although I do not know how widely shared this understanding is. An emotion is more immediate and concentrated: it belongs to a particular moment and may find expression in an equally immediate musical gesture. A feeling persists. It changes over time, accumulates different shades and gradually creates its own inner world. For that reason, it also carries the possibility of a narrative.
Almost every piece on the album has such a narrative behind it, whether it is clearly stated or only suggested. At the same time, I deliberately leave out most of the particular circumstances from which the music arose. I want to preserve the emotional truth of an experience without defining it so precisely that it can belong only to me. By omitting those details, I hope to leave enough space for other people to recognise something of their own lives within the music.
Fragility, distance, absence, belonging and moments of light therefore belong together not because I selected them as themes for an album, but because they are different traces left by the same stretch of life.
Oliver:
“We, as Our Home” opens the album with the idea that home can be a feeling of being together rather than a physical place, inspired by a long-distance relationship. What does that idea of home mean to you personally, and why did it feel like the right place to begin the album?
Niel Lian:
In this case, I have been more explicit about the personal origin of the piece. The relationship on which it is based was lived at a distance for a period of time, and the initial musical idea emerged during a moment of melancholy. As the piece developed, however, its meaning became more complex. Home was no longer simply a place I missed, nor was it entirely identified with another person. It became something created between two people: a shared emotional space that can continue to exist even when they are physically apart.
The piece opens the album for more than one reason. Musically, I experience it as warm and welcoming, so it felt like the right doorway into a journey made of both shadow and light. But there is also a more personal and very simple reason: without that relationship, this album would probably not exist.
My music had already existed for decades, but it had remained largely confined to a private space. Within this relationship, I found the warmth, the state of mind and the encouragement I needed to bring it into the world—and, naturally, to continue creating new music. Other pieces on the album also emerged, more or less directly, from the same story.
So We, as Our Home does not merely introduce the album’s themes. In a sense, it introduces the place from which the entire album became possible.
Oliver:
“Ahead, Not Too Far” introduces the idea of moving forward without needing to know exactly what lies ahead. How has learning to live with uncertainty influenced your own life, and how did you translate that feeling into the piano?
Niel Lian:
Ahead, Not Too Far is one of the pieces in which I most consciously searched for a personal musical language. It begins with elements of the musical vocabulary I have absorbed over time and, as often happens in my work, with melodic lines born from vocal sketches. This time, however, the material is developed primarily through variation.
I would not describe it as a theme and variations in the strict formal sense: the theme is not presented as a self-contained object followed by a series of clearly separated transformations. Instead, the principle of variation operates beneath the surface, in a freer and less explicit form.
Theme and variations has always fascinated me because it allows music to move forward without severing its connection to its origin. Something remains recognisable while its shape, rhythm, harmony or character changes. In my mind, this principle reflects the meaning of the title itself: moving ahead, but not too far—exploring new directions while keeping strong roots.
This is also how I have gradually learned to live with uncertainty. Moving forward does not always require seeing the entire route; sometimes it is enough to recognise the next possible step without losing contact with what has brought us there.
Oliver:
“There and Back Again” suggests both returning to life and discovering the possibility of becoming someone new. How do you see the relationship between returning to something familiar and allowing yourself to change?
Niel Lian:
I do not think we ever return to exactly the same place, because the journey has already altered the person who is returning. Something familiar may offer orientation, continuity or even protection, but it cannot simply restore an earlier version of ourselves.
For me, returning to life does not mean pretending that nothing happened. It means recognising what remains familiar while allowing it to acquire a different meaning. In that sense, going back and becoming someone new are not opposites. Sometimes we need to return in order to understand what has changed, what still belongs to us and what can no longer be inhabited in the same way.
The piece moves through this tension. Certain musical elements return, but they do not return untouched: their context and emotional weight have changed.
Oliver:
“Before I Miss” captures the unusual experience of beginning to miss someone before the separation has even happened. What interested you about that emotional space between presence and absence, and how did you approach expressing something so difficult to define through an instrumental piece?
Niel Lian:
I am not sure that this experience is so unusual—at least, it was not unusual for me. When you know that a separation is approaching, the future absence can enter the present and begin to alter it before anything has actually happened.
The piece emerged very naturally from a vocal sketch while I was thinking, with some melancholy, about the recurring ritual of parting that would take place a few hours later. The two main themes appeared almost at once. From there, I developed the rest of the piece while trying to remain within that feeling.
I did not attempt to define the experience first and then translate it into music. The music was already its first form of expression. Perhaps instrumental music is particularly suited to such an ambiguous state, because it allows presence and absence to coexist without requiring either of them to be fully explained or resolved.
I will not be more explicit about the particular circumstances, but I can reveal one detail: Before I Miss is the earlier composition I mentioned before—the one originally written for flute, precisely because the piece was essentially vocal in character and the flute seemed its most natural voice. When I returned to it, however, I felt that some passages needed a supporting texture. At first, I imagined adding a piano accompaniment to the flute; eventually, I realised that the piano alone could contain both the melodic voice and the support it needed.
Oliver:
“Harrowing the Darkness” takes a different approach by confronting darkness rather than turning away from it. What does facing fear directly mean to you, and did writing this piece change anything about the way you personally understood that darkness?
Niel Lian:
I think the spirit of this piece is fearless—not because fear is absent, but because the music reacts to something negative with urgency and determination.
The title was suggested by my colleague Andrés Flores Centeno, who speaks several languages fluently, including English, and has a deep passion for literature. It proved remarkably precise because of the double meaning of harrowing. The word is commonly associated with something painful or distressing, but to harrow also means to break up and work the soil in preparation for planting. This is exactly the image I had been looking for: not escaping the darkness or pretending to defeat it, but working through it as if it were difficult ground.
The darkness does not simply disappear. It is disturbed, broken open and transformed. In the process, the person who confronts it also emerges changed, with a greater awareness of what that darkness contains.
Oliver:
One of the album’s most striking titles is “A Breakfast with the Ghosts I’m Afraid Of,” which approaches inner fears with both seriousness and a touch of irony. Who are those ghosts for you, and what does inviting them to breakfast represent?
Niel Lian:
I have plenty of ghosts keeping me company. The most frequent are probably the negative thoughts that circle around unresolved situations—particularly those that are unlikely ever to be fully resolved. I could simply call them fears, but some of these ghosts are considerably more complicated than that.
Nor should they be confused with skeletons in the closet, which, as everyone knows, tend mostly to stay where they are. Ghosts, on the other hand, move around and return. They have to be faced from time to time—preferably not every morning.
Oliver:
“Healing” was written during a period of care and real recovery, with the piece focusing on presence, waiting, and hope. How did the experience of healing influence the way you approached the composition, particularly the idea that recovery has its own uncertain rhythm?
Niel Lian:
I think the experience from which this piece emerged is one that many people encounter at some point over the course of a life. The piece was not composed while I was living through that experience. At the time, my mind seemed to protect me by numbing part of what I was feeling. I had to respond to what was happening and remain present, and there was very little space to experience its full emotional weight.
This does not mean that I felt nothing. Sensitivity had been postponed rather than erased. Only later, when the immediate need to react had receded, was I able to retrace the experience and recognise the different feelings that had accumulated within it.
Fear, hope, sadness and relief had alternated across a long period, sometimes overlapping rather than following one another in an orderly sequence. Recovery had no steady rhythm or simple direction, and my memory of it could not be reduced to a straightforward progression from fear to relief.
Here too, the main themes first emerged as vocal sketches. When bringing them together into a single composition, I followed the way those underlying feelings had changed over time. It is closer to an emotional memory of healing than to an account of what happened.
Oliver:
“Rise at Your Personal Rhythms” focuses on recognising your own way of growing and becoming rather than measuring yourself against someone else’s pace. How important has the idea of finding your personal rhythm been in your own development as an artist and as a person?
Niel Lian:
My artistic path has not been linear or particularly conventional, so I have had to accept that its timing belongs to me. The title is deliberately plural because I do not think we possess only one rhythm. Different parts of us grow at different speeds. Recognising those rhythms is not an excuse for immobility; it is a way of moving without becoming alienated from ourselves.
There is also a literary idea behind the piece: Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity. Her stories deal, in different ways, with lives reaching points of change. My own idea developed from that image but became plural. I was thinking about forms of growth taking place simultaneously on different levels, each proceeding at its own legitimate pace—even when that pace is slow—and occasionally reaching a turning point.
I translated this into the composition by working primarily with different rhythms and with the gradual expansion of the musical phrase. The music grows without following a single, uniform pace. For me, that reflects both personal and artistic development: progress does not always mean moving faster, and transformation may be taking place even when it is not yet visible.
Oliver:
“Chasing the Way Out” explores the instinct to begin moving before you necessarily know where that movement will lead. Do you think there are moments in life when simply refusing to remain where you are is enough of a reason to begin?
Niel Lian:
Yes. There are moments when remaining still has become more dangerous than moving without a clear destination. We tend to think that change should begin with a plan, but sometimes the first honest decision is simply recognising that the present condition is no longer sustainable.
The word “chasing” contains urgency, but the title does not claim that the way out has already been found. The movement itself comes first. That can be irrational, imperfect and even contradictory, but it restores possibility. I think there are times when “not here any longer” is the only certainty available—and that may be enough to begin.
Oliver:
“The Sound of Sunlit Days” imagines what lighter, brighter days might sound like as a mental escape from everyday intensity. What does light represent to you within the album, and how did you translate that sense of brightness into the piano without making it feel disconnected from everything that came before?
Niel Lian:
Light in the album does not represent a permanent escape from difficulty. It is closer to a temporary opening: the memory, anticipation or invention of days in which life feels less burdened. Their brightness matters precisely because we know it may not last.
Musically, I used a more flowing and luminous melodic movement, but I did not want to remove every shadow. There is still a darker undercurrent, particularly in the lower register, which prevents the piece from becoming an idealised postcard. The sunlit days belong to the same life as the difficult ones. They are not disconnected from fragility; their fragility is part of what makes them precious.
Oliver:
“Gratitude” comes from one of those rare moments when everything seems to fall into place. Why was it important to include a piece centred on gratitude after the album has travelled through so much uncertainty, fear, and healing?
Niel Lian:
Because gratitude is not the denial of what came before. Sometimes it becomes possible only because we understand how easily things might have been different. It is not constant happiness or the belief that everything has been resolved. It is a moment in which the pieces of life seem, unexpectedly, to occupy the right places.
After so much waiting, fear and movement, the album needed to acknowledge that such moments exist. But “Gratitude” is not the final track, because gratitude is not the end of uncertainty. It is something that can appear within it—a pause in which we recognise what is present before life begins moving again.
Oliver:
The album was recorded on acoustic piano, including pieces that first appeared on your 2025 debut EP and were later revisited and refined. What did returning to those earlier compositions reveal to you about how your musical voice had developed between the EP and this album?
Niel Lian:
The refinements were few and very specific, and they did not alter the melodic lines. The most significant changes were two passages in Resilience in a World on Fire that I recast in irregular metres to create a stronger sense of instability. In a way, the limited extent of these revisions was itself revealing: the essential musical voice of those pieces was already there.
The EP was recorded using a digital piano and Native Instruments’ NOIRE library, based on Nils Frahm’s concert grand, which I still consider a fantastic instrument. The limitation is mine rather than the technology’s: at this stage, I do not feel that I am able to establish a sufficiently symbiotic relationship with a digital instrument.
For the album, I therefore returned to the acoustic piano. Its physical and acoustic response allows the instrument, the performance and the performer to become parts of the same process in a way that I currently find more natural.
Oliver:
With a solo piano album, there is nowhere for the emotion to hide behind a large arrangement or ensemble. What does the acoustic piano allow you to communicate that you might not be able to express as directly through a more heavily produced recording?
Niel Lian:
What I sometimes miss in the piano is the true sustain that other instruments can produce. A piano note begins to decay immediately, so I can only suggest continuity through the pedal, repetition or other essentially artificial means.
On the other hand, there are enormous advantages in working with a single instrument that offers such a wide range of possibilities. One of them is reproducibility: the entire piece can be performed again without having to reconstruct a complex production or bring together an ensemble.
Chopin’s influence on me lies precisely in this idea of the piano as a self-sufficient instrument. If I ever expand beyond it, I imagine adding only one or two instruments—just enough to provide a colour or continuity that the piano cannot create by itself, rather than building a large arrangement.
Oliver:
The twelve pieces work independently while also forming a non-linear journey, meaning the listener can encounter each story on its own while gradually recognising the larger narrative. How carefully did you consider the sequencing, and what did you want the listener to understand by the time they reached the final track?
Niel Lian:
The sequence was considered very carefully, although not according to a neat or strictly logical progression. The opening and closing pieces had always been fixed points, as they already were on the EP.
The first part of the album occupies a more adventurous and exploratory space before gradually moving into darker territory. The two consecutive pieces A Breakfast with the Ghosts I’m Afraid Of and Chasing the Way Out together form the turning point. The first confronts the ghosts; the second transforms that confrontation into urgent movement. From there, the album begins to move towards its more luminous pieces, although shadow and light continue to alternate rather than following a simple progression, until the arrival of the title track.
Oliver:
The title track closes the album without suggesting that the world has been repaired or that uncertainty has disappeared. Instead, it leaves us with the possibility that hope can coexist with fragility. After completing the album, what does resilience mean to you now, and what do you hope listeners carry with them when the final notes of “Resilience in a World on Fire” fade away?
Niel Lian:
Perhaps the usual explanation of the title track requires some further context. Its origin is rather intricate. Faced with global events that shocked me, I found myself returning to several old questions—questions that many other people are also asking, or at least I hope they are.
How can we recognise these dangers before they reach us, and how can they be prevented? Or, to phrase the same question in its oldest and most difficult form: where does evil come from?
I will spare you the succession of books and ideas through which I pursued these questions. I began following those events daily, initially believing that they would be resolved within a relatively short time. That did not happen.
The piece offers a form of hope, but that hope is deliberately insufficient. I was recently struck by Kristen Stewart’s insistence, as a filmmaker, that art should not always be expected to make people feel comfortable. I believe that this is especially true now. Art may contain hope, but it should not reassure us by suggesting that everything will somehow resolve itself. Perhaps the least it can do is preserve our awareness that the world is on fire—and prevent that awareness from fading into resignation or becoming normal.
The word resilience was not originally part of the title: I had another word in mind. It was Michele Bargigia—drawing this time on his perspective as a psychologist—who helped me understand why resilience was, in fact, the right one. I had always been wary of it because it has become so widely used and seems to carry several, sometimes conflicting, meanings. Not all of them correspond to what I wanted to express. In the end, however, I came to recognise that it was the most accurate word.
For me, then, resilience does not mean simply enduring or adapting. Adaptation can become a form of acceptance, and acceptance can make even the intolerable appear normal. Resilience means preserving our capacity to be disturbed, reconnecting with whatever good remains within our reach and finding in it the energy to respond.
I do not expect listeners to carry away a reassuring answer when the final notes fade. I would rather the music left them with an awareness that the world is on fire, that this should never feel normal, and that fragility does not make action impossible. Hope may be faint and insufficient, but it can still be the beginning of movement.
“On Resilience in a World on Fire, Niel Lian turns the piano into a space where uncertainty is not something to be defeated, but something to be faced, understood, and carried without surrendering our capacity to respond.”
~ Oliver (DULAXI Team)
EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVE
What stayed with me most strongly about Lian’s album is its refusal to force emotional experiences into neat conclusions. The solo piano setting gives the compositions room to breathe, while the recurring ideas of movement, repetition, return, and variation create connections between very different emotional states. The album’s strongest quality is its honesty about uncertainty. It allows tenderness, anger, fear, gratitude, and hope to exist within the same world without asking any of them to cancel the others.
~ Oliver (DULAXI Team)
CLOSING
Our conversation with Niel Lian offers a thoughtful look into the ideas, experiences, and musical decisions behind Resilience in a World on Fire. From the intimate understanding of home in “We, as Our Home” to the unresolved questions surrounding the title track, the album reveals a composer interested not in offering easy answers, but in giving complex feelings enough space to exist.
Thank you to Niel Lian for taking the time to share such detailed insight into his creative process, his influences, and the personal ideas that shaped this twelve-track journey. We hope this conversation gives both longtime listeners and those discovering his work for the first time a deeper connection to the music.
We encourage you to spend time with Resilience in a World on Fire and experience the album on its own terms. As its final notes fade, what remains is not a promise that uncertainty has disappeared, but the possibility that awareness, fragility, and hope can still become reasons to keep moving.
Thank you for spending time with DULAXI. This is Oliver, and we look forward to bringing you more conversations with artists and creators whose work deserves to be heard, understood, and explored.