Artist Profile: Diptera
If you exist outside of the hyper-intertwined Houston music scene, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard the name diptera yet. If that’s the case, it’s probably best you familiarize yourself with them, at least before their genre-bending, improvisationally-rooted sound comes knocking on your door of its own accord.
Composed of Ian McGilber, Mufasa Enzor, Maxx Salazar, Darien “Da’Grant” Grant, and Nikki Pararuan, diptera’s release of their debut album, warmth & warfare, back in August marked not only a watershed moment for the band but also a consequential juncture for their developing style, blending elements of soul, hip-hop, jazz, indie rock, metal, and essentially everything in between.
Every member of the band is a versatile instrumentalist, and in the context of their revolving histories, diptera’s striking sonic chemistry makes perfect sense.
That story is convoluted, to say the least.
It partially began when Maxx and Nikki met as teenagers at Guitar Center, with Nikki’s dad forcing him to introduce himself. The two jammed on the spot and immediately became friends, later forming a metal band that would serve as the basis for their first steps into the Houston music scene.
It also began when Mufasa and Ian were introduced through Mufasa’s uncle, who worked with Ian at Whole Foods. They would later run into each other at a large studio session, leading to a, at the time, hypothetical conversation about their mutual desire to start a band.
It began when Da’Grant met Mufasa, who introduced him to Ian, who helped find him a new apartment in the building he was living in.
It began when Ian, working at Guitar Center, saw Nikki become one of the store’s most frequent customers before they were even acquainted.
It began through an intricate web of connections, culminating in a talented group of musicians who, over a series of chance encounters, came to feel as though they possessed a common goal. Slowly but surely, they found their way towards each other.
“Next thing I knew,” said Mufasa, “we kind of just kind of clicked.”
Mufasa, Ian, Nikki, and Maxx all began getting together to jam, and the energy was noticeably special from the very outset. While they entered with no true, concrete vision for their sound, their unique musical backgrounds, and their individual love for music of all kinds, rapidly began to meld together.
“It was just something different. It was something that I've never really felt playing with other artists or playing with bands,” said Maxx, “It was something that felt passionate. It felt like the music that was coming out was, it was an extension of us. It just kept going. It still feels that way. Every time we make music or play a show, I don't have a similar experience with anything else. It's always diptera that does it for me.”
Yet, at that time, they were still missing their secret ingredient: the soulful eclecticism and obscure sampling skill-set of Da’Grant. It took Mufasa a while to convince him to join the band, but, once he did, it seemed as though everything came together.
“Da’Grant is one of the most eclectic individuals a person could ever meet. This man is a culture aficionado,” said Nikki, “if you think about hunting and picking and antiquing and anything retro, anything vintage, any thrift, Da’Grant has that under his thumb… [He’s] just one of those wells of knowledge.”
From there, the group began to spend hours in each other’s orbit, improvising constantly and working tirelessly to carve out track after track from their rapidly developing sonic landscape. Yet, unlike the formation of many groups, there was no conscious effort to nail down a genre or even a consistently recognizable sound. Instead, those early days were a process of bonding, a reprieve from the emotional toll that life had taken on each of the band’s members, and the songs that resulted were merely the products and manifestations of that journey.
“It just ended up getting transferred into the music, through the instruments, through everything that we played,” said Mufasa, “And I think that's what we built Diptera around was our need to create, our need to have an outlet for our physical or mental or spiritual.”
Many of the tracks on their album, warmth & warfare, were direct incarnations of this period, and the raw creativity, the “lightning in a bottle” that period signified, are abundantly evident across virtually every song on the project. Meant to operate under the emotional symbolism of love as a battlefield, warmth & warfare is both sonically and psychically dense, from the crooning, dusty synths of “kryptonite” to the silky rhythms of “Ladybug,” to the mind-bending samples of “BELLTOWER.”
It’s impossible to truly nail down the record to one singular genre, or even a sub-set of genres. It operates in a liminal space that, in many ways, can only be aptly defined by the artistic “brotherhood” to which Ian refers.
“In my opinion, [the album is partially about] brotherhood, which is something that's rare. It's just something you don't find a lot of the time,” said Ian, “I want to use our platform to show that it's a family thing, you know what I mean? Look out for each other, not just each other as friends, not just each other as Americans or whatever nationality, but we all share this earth…”
