Short Bio
Delphine Dora is a musician, composer and improviser from France. Working mainly with keyboard instruments (piano, church organ, harmonium, electronic keyboard…), her music has been enriched in recent years with the addition of field recordings in her compositions. The voice is also one of its privileged instruments, which sometimes takes support in the language of the poets, sometimes in an imaginary language, language freed from any signifier, deep part of a hidden self, but also plural and mutant voices which are incarnated inside her. A fragile and embodied voice, archaic, mystic and mysterious, profondly free, which draws from her intimacy and the invisible, capable of sudden reversals.
Her iconoclastic music can be read as a personal mapping work, based on an intuitive approach of the composition and nourished by many approaches. For more than 15 years, she has been developing an intimate and plural musical universe, in perpetual metamorphosis, situated at the crossroads of different musical genres (folk music, minimalist music, improvised music, electro-acoustic music…) and languages (English, French, German, imaginary languages…). Prolific musician, she has participated to about 20 records and more (solo and collaborations) in various aesthetics on many French and foreign labels. She was also the founder of the Wild Silence label.
Long Bio
Delphine Dora is a musician, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, improviser and composer from France. She began learning music by playing classical piano at a very young age. After a few years of pause, she resumed her musical practice in her early twenties, in a purely self-taught way, recording herself with rudimentary means (cassette players, dictaphone…), creating little songs in English, then improvising mini rhymes in an imaginary language, creating a kind of musical art brut, a form of spontaneous automatic writing. In parallel to the recording of her first music, she carries out during several years research on art brut which find an echo in her own musical practice and will lead her to make a thesis on this subject.
Her meditative piano playing has been nourished by classical, contemporary and improvised music, from Erik Satie to Harold Budd, via the minimalists; she also has a recent passion for the work of the church organ (in relation with architecture of church), or can improvise occasionally on a harmonium, a keyboard, a harpsichord, a grand piano or a modular synthesizer… She uses her voice in a singular way, that translates the exploration of a secret intimacy, which sometimes takes support in the language of the poets, sometimes in glossolalia, language freed from any signifier, deep part of a hidden self, but also plural and mutant voices which are incarnated in her. A fragile and embodied voice, profoundly free, which draws from the living matter of the world and the invisible, from archaic and future times. A voice that finds echoes in idiosyncrasic singers like Nico, Meredith Monk, Patty Waters, Fursaxa or Josephine Foster.
Her iconoclastic and ever-changing music can be read as a personal cartographic work, based on an intuitive approach to composition and nourished by many approaches. Her approach is plural, sensorial, poetic and experimental. For the past fifteen years, she has been developing an intimate and plural musical universe, in perpetual metamorphosis, situated at the crossroads of different musical genres (folk music, minimalist music, improvised music, electro-acoustic music…) and languages (English, French, German, imaginary languages…), exploring themes such as madness, mysticism, dreams, elsewhere.
Prolific musician, she has participated to about twenty records and more (solo and collaborations) in various aesthetics on many French and international labels (three:four records (FR/Switzerland), Meakusma (Be), Feeding Tube Records (USA), Okraïna (Be), Fort Evil Fruit (Irl), Was Ist Das? (USA), Le Laps (Canada), Titania (France), Morc Tapes (Belgium), several of which have received a very good critical reception. She is also the founder of the Wild Silence label (about twenty records for her solo work or the work of other French and foreign musicians working in aesthetics ranging from folk to ambient, from free improvisation to experimental music: Monte Isola, Ensemble0, Mami Wata, Richard Moult, Cristian Alvear, Lodz, Powerdove, Thollem McDonas, etc…). In 2020, she published L’inattingible, her most ambitious record to date, composed entirely in French with 14 musicians from all over the world and about thirty instruments.
In addition to her solo work, she has worked and collaborated on recordings and/or concerts with many French musicians: Mocke, Eloïse Decazes, Bruno Duplant, Gilles Deles, Mathias Dufil, Cathy Heyden, Claire Serres, Roxane Métayer, Michel Henritzi, Emmanuelle Parrenin, etc. and foreign musicians of the experimental scene: Sophie Cooper, Alessandro Bosetti, Andrew Chalk, Raymond Dijkstra, Susanna Wallumrod, Jackie McDowell, Wolf Eyes, le fruit vert, Laura Naukkarinen, Sylvia Hallett, Helena Espvall, Valentina Magaletti, Alexandra Spence, etc.
She has also participated in performance projects (musical readings with writers Charles Robinson, Dana Hilliot or with video artist, curator, geographer and poet Amy Cutler), projected sound-drawing performances with author-illustrator for youth Elis Wilk. She has also worked in collaboration with filmmaker Michel Zumpf and essayist Pacôme Thiellement for a concrete music/collage album « Un Monde sans dehors/Un dehors sans monde ».
She has performed in France in many places in Europe such as Cafe OTO (London), Brotfabrik (Frankfurt), Instants Chavirés (Montreuil), Cave12 (Geneva), Ausland (Berlin), Piano Drome (Edinburgh), MK Gallery (Milton Keynes), Ateliers Claus (Brussels), EACC – Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló (Spain), l’église de St Saphorin (Switzerland), Le Périscope (Lyon), Galerie de l’Art du Temps / Chapelle de l’Oratoire (Clermont-Ferrand), and festivals such as Le Guess Who / invited by Julia Holter (Netherlands), Fanø Free Folk Festival (DK), Supernormal Festival (UK), Copenhagen Jazz Festival (Denmark), Times Zone Festival (Bari, Italy), Festival de la Cité (Lausanne), Festival les Oreilles Libres (Montreuil), etc.
Her musical work is regularly broadcast on radio (France Musique, NTS, WFMU, Radio Campus, Radio Panik, etc.) and presented in specialized publications such as Revue&Corrigée, The Quietus, The Wire, Inactuelles, A Closer Listen, Foxy Digitalis…
In 2019-2020, she joins the post-graduate program « arts and sound creation » at ENSA Bourges to enrich her musical practice towards the dimension of sound, both in terms of composition and in terms of its relationship to space and diffusion. She is currently interested in a hybridization of her means of expression, focusing on the relationship between sound, voice and music, sound synthesis and acoustic instrumentation, field recordings and relationship to acoustic spaces, presence and spectra. In 2021, she was commissioned by GRM & Radio France for the radio program « Création Mondiale » on France Musique.
Delphine Dora is also a self-taught visual artist. Since September 2022, she writes in revue&corrigée, a written surface of experimental practices and hosts a bi-monthly show on LYL Radio
Delphine Dora 