>>> AVANT MUSIC NEWS – AMN Reviews :
« Delphine Dora is a classically trained French pianist who plays as close to the wild heart you can get. (…) Discovering a piano in the wilderness, she tests a voice that hasn´t been used in centuries, inventing a new language to claim the land as far as it reaches. (…) Près du coeur sauvage is a kind of masterpiece in its sometimes off-key, very off-kilter insistence; a raw, chthonic, yet fair-complected folk music, old as mountains and unbeholden to any tectonic shift other than within its own, ancient soul. » – Stephen Fruitman
>>> TERRASCOPE :
« A collection of unsettling yet gorgeous songs from Delphine Dora. Using mainly voice and Piano, augmented by atmospheric sounds and textures the songs weave a magic that is both delicate and deeply emotional, the tunes draped with a layer of disquiet yet containing a calm centre, the balance between the two states creating a rich tension that gives the songs a vibrant presence. Over 11 songs the listener is lulled and hypnotised, melodies drifting by, strange sounds fluttering in and out of range creating half remembered images that lie just under the surface, the whole aching and writhing with possibilities just beyond your grasp. » – Simon Lewis
>>>> PSI LAB RECOMMANDATION :
psilabtapes.blogspot.fr/2016/11/recommendation-157-delphine-dora.html
« I’ve been working my way back through DORA’s discography and i have yet to hear anything i don’t dig, but i keep coming back to this PARALLEL WORLD where her music seems fully realized and perfectly crystallized – she conjures otherworldly bygone acid folk arias with haunting modern classical / minimal piano accompaniment that recalls CHRISTINA CARTER and FURSAXA but with even more alluring intimate cerebral weirdness and intersecting further out outsiders like INCA ORE and PHIPPS PT and JACKIE MCDOWELL aka INEZ LIGHTFOOT (whose latest gem NEW BLOOD MEDICINE is out via WILD SILENCE, grab it while you can) – sadly PARALLEL WORLD is sold out at the source but don’t let that diminish this amazing album, dig the free download. »
>>>> AGITATION FRITE par Philippe Robert :
« La pianiste et vocaliste Delphine Dora, quand à elle, invente un monde à base d’improvisations et de compositions spontanées, parfois basée sur la poésie de Sylvia Plath ou Walt Whitman ou bien les « folk songs » de Luciano Berio pour Cathy Berberian, comme en témoigne un enregistrement en compagnie d’Eloïse Decazes.
La cassette Parallel World en offre un aperçu jamais très loin des recherches de Christina Carter, Fursaxa, voir Richard Youngs sur Advent (pour le piano notamment). Sur d’autres enregistrements, des morceaux comme « Funga Mundi » ou « le mystère demeure » évoqueraient plutôt respectivement, Meredith Monk et Nico. On ne sait quoi de Brigitte Fontaine aussi – et parfois. On dit aussi que Julia Holter apprécie la française. »
>>> The QUIETUS :
On « Le Fruit De Mes Songes » Delphine Dora delivers a different, perhaps darker, shade of the unknown. Sixties psyche folk, Christian hymns and nursery songs – styles regularly deployed in horror films to deepen the mystery – seem syncretically blended here. Such is the uniqueness of her possessed, child-like song, the brain immediately grasps for such reference points lending these eight new pieces a haunted air. Alternating between piano, harpsichord and what sounds like a church organ, the traditional accompaniment reinforces the eerieness.
>>>> WE NEED NO SWORDS by Paul Margree :
« Only about a third of the pieces on Delphine Dora’s L’au-delà use the piano as their primary instrumentation, but these are the pieces that stand out, at least at first. Dora’s playing meets at the junction of Monk’s broken physicality and the minimalist, hammering repetition of Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study No. 2, the density of the latter crossed with the fluid breadth of the former, all the while holding a jewel-like glint of beauty close to its heart (…) The vocals, with their contrasting lines of high-pitched ululations and spoken stream-of-consciousness monologues, are in the tradition of experimentalists like Meredith Monk or Annette Peacock. But Dora ups the melodrama and anxiety to a new pitch, multi-tracking herself to pack each piece full of sonic information. That combination of vocal and instrumental overload puts immense pressure onto the fabric of songs such as Les chevaux de feu, pushing them almost to breaking point. Listening to this piece is like trying to walk to the shops after a night on the whisky, the alcohol-induced euphoria fading into an unbalancing dizziness, internal and external stimuli colliding into a hellish miasma of light and sound. Idiosyncratically brilliant. »
Delphine Dora 