French pianist and improviser Delphine Dora is an artist I haven’t thought about in a really long time before her latest album accidentally ended up in my recent downloads folder. I am an extremely messy and impulsive hoarder when it comes to music and despite not actively pitching reviews so much in the last couple of years my inbox is still flooded with promos. As an industry friend put it, at this point there’s a ratio of five or six PR people pushing music to one journalist. However, this was one of the happier coincidences when my body just does things without thinking and I am extremely glad that it did.
I remember first getting into her music as part of the crop of ambient / free improvisation rabbit hole I fell down circa 2010. Later, her presence was marginally in my life through her music and a soundcloud follow back on my noise project’s profile that I was extremely proud of.
L’ineluctable pulsation du temps (roughly “the fatal pulsation of time”), originally composed in 2018, charms right straight off the bat – not even 20 seconds in, those deeply majestic harmonics elicit the instinctive somatic positive response in my body and I’m already hooked. Her compositions use a similar framework to Lou Harrison‘s music, the American composer most famous for using Indonesian Gamelan alongside western instruments and pairing the repetitive, often meditative nature of Javanese composition with Major chord progressions to hauntingly beautiful results. The initial instrument he trained in was also the piano.
As the title suggests, the album’s overarching theme is the notion of time in all its glory and merciless continuity. As someone who’s lost countless battles to this cruel and elusive enemy, I delight in Dora’s playful musical chronicling of Chronos. Opener “Ubiquité” (“Ubiquity”) sets a somber, imposing tone with a crushing wall of sound-like drone against which Dora balances ghostly, angelic vocals and delicate, trembling strings driven in time by the repetitive piano melody, as if trying to convey the divine nature of the God of Time. Things turn slightly softer on “Les jours liquides” (“Liquid Days”), where another drone and keys structure forms, yet this time the background is noisier, more acidic, while the piano flows in a Mercurial high-pitched register set against flute and bell contrepoints. “Désynchronisation” feels like a broken player-piano version of a “Gnossiene”, all mechanical, dissonance and decay.
There’s a clear American minimalist inspiration over these hypnotic piano and drone passages where repetitive harmonies change into fractalic melodies.
Another word that comes to mind is late Romanian spectral list composer Octavian Nemerscu’s Muzica orelor or Cartea orelor (Book of Hours), an esoteric, epic 24 hour composition cycle dedicated to each hour of the day, written between 1993 and 2004 and arguably his magnum opus. L’ineluctable pulsation du temps might be a more modest meditation on time, but its impact and beauty are undeniable.
