From the historic paramount of Lucca, Italy, a new voice emerges in contemporary piano composition: composer and pianist Niel Lian and his satisfying contemplative debut EP, Resilience in a World on Fire. This five-track work arrives as a quiet, emotive counterpart to our increasingly chaotic planet. Rather than overwhelm the listener with force, Lian pursues contemplation, space, and melodious truthfulness. His compositions are deeply rooted in classical traditions but informed by modern minimalism, placing him within the lineage of Chopin, Philip Glass, Wim Mertens, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, and even the psychological depth of Peter Gabriel's storytelling.
Although purely instrumental, Resilience in a World on Fire speaks with a special kind of clarity. Each composition contemplates the fragile architecture of the human heart, how we maneuver distance, fear, love, memory, and becoming ourselves, slowly. Lian never treats resilience as heroism, but rather recontextualizes it as presence; that steady, conscious choice to remain open to being with the world, even when our lives are precarious.
The EP develops as a five-part narrative. “We, as our home” begins the project with love, conceived from a distance and with the awareness that belonging is not to a location but to the human connection of feeling home. The second song, “Healing,” captures the long, slow work of recovery, granting patience and breath, yet is not a song of success, but rather a song of staying, of coming back to oneself, day after day.
In “Harrowing the Darkness,” darkness appears; a moment of resistance; of motion. This darkening moment is reflective of outdoor and bodily action; Lian revels in an embrace of repetition and tension, reminiscent of the exploration of early minimalist artists. “A Breakfast with the Ghosts I’m Afraid Of” is possibly the emotional weight of the EP, a meeting of fragmented poetry with memory and, even, inward fear. Instead of proliferating pain, as commonly appears in verbal lyricism, Lian disarms it with lightness, where her embracement gently utters: sit with your ghosts, offer your ghosts food, energy will lose its power.
The title track, "Resilience in a World on Fire," concludes the EP, carefully weaving together joyfulness and sorrow of the journey. Time feels fluid, elastic. Hope emerges, not as a grand crescendo, but as a quick thought that says clarity is possible when flames surround us.
What makes this debut special is its honesty. There is no ornamental ego, decoration for decoration’s sake, but simply purpose. Lian writes with restraint, giving as much room to silence as to sound. Every pause, preview, and movement has some rationale behind it. The music is reflective, meditative, and grounding. Niel Lian makes a strong argument for being an emerging voice in our neoclassical and minimalist landscape with this release. Resilience in a World on Fire is more than a debut; it is a personal claim and philosophy about an evolving sound and what is yet to come. In a time that says things are perched precariously, Lian reminds us these are not loud when we fall over. Sometimes, like the title suggests, resilience is one piano, continuing to play.