Delphine Dora first came to our attention through her output on her self-run label, Wild Silence. Since that initial discovery, she has gone on to issue a number of solo and collaborative works across several other notable labels such Fort Evil Fruit, Feeding Tube Records, Power Moves Library, Okraïna and more. Her back catalog covers a remarkably broad range of styles that often straddles the lines between jazz, improvisation, modern classical, avant folk, ambient, drone, and field recordings. Her work, more than anything, displays a pure fascination with sound. Her latest full-length album, L’inattingible, is arguably her most ambitious and highly orchestrated statement yet, marking a major creative leap forward for her as a songwriter and composer. It’s one of our favorite albums of 2020 so far, so we reached out to Delphine via email and she was kind enough to respond to our questions about her new album and more. After reading this Q & A, we encourage you to check out the recordings that Delphine has available on her Bandcamp page and to support her efforts in whatever way that you can. 

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How are you doing right now with all that is happening in the world? What is life like in your part of France?

I’m living in a small village of 100 people in the center of France in the countryside. I feel very lucky to be at this location at this moment of history, far from epidemics. To have space around and nature is a great privilege also. At the same time, I am very affected by what is happening now. I couldn’t think of anything else the first days and again still the events and the current situation are very present in my consciousness. It’s very hard to live without caring and without paying any attention to it.

It’s very strange to live like this, by distance through the media and live at the same time in an environment so quiet, so beautiful, and so far from the turmoil. It’s hard to imagine and crazy to realize our world has collapsed so quickly. Rather than bury my head and turn my back to the world, I try to embrace uncertainty and try to keep creative. So, I try to keep myself busy despite that. My schedule hasn’t really changed when I’m here: I spend my time making music, working on my archives, composing, working on sound works, making field recordings, walking, being outside, listening to records, reading, making photography, drawing, thinking, talking, etc… and above all I’m deeply and carefully listening the sounds outside – the birds singing – and trying to savour the subtlety and beautiful quality of sound around.

Collaboration has always played an important role in your musical output over the years, but on L’Inattingible you really take collaboration to the next level having worked with something like a dozen or more different artists from all over the world. Knowing how logistically challenging that would be, what compelled you to reach out and work with so many musicians on this new album? How long did it take you to record L’Inattingible?

Yes, that’s true that with L’inattingible I’ve never worked with that many musicians before. This time it involved 14 musicians that live in different countries (Canada, Australia, USA, UK, Finland, Portugal, Belgium…). It was challenging and logistically complicated to make, it’s so true, but I was so attracted by the idea of working on this record with many musicians I love so much that I felt ready to take up the challenge. It took approximately one year (a bit less) to make the record, from the writing of the first drafts of lyrics to the final mixing, with periods of intense work. 

When I started recording the first drafts of the songs, in August, I never imagined for a moment that these songs would have taken on a new dimension and that they would sound like the final versions you’re hearing today. I composed the sketches and the foundations of the songs that were going to make up the album in 3 weeks; it was three weeks of intense jubilation and unbridled creation. I remember this period as something exciting and painful at the same time (because I had never been so invested in a record with so much effort, redoing tracks a multitude of times to be satisfied).

It had been several months, even more than a year, that I started to think, to fantasize about another music. After Eudaimon, I didn’t want to make a new record that was too similar and focused only on piano and voice and interpreting other texts than mine. 

At that time I had a desire for change and a new ambition in terms of sound. I wanted to go beyond the risky and spontaneous aspects of the music I was used to making, towards something more complex, rich, and also dense in terms of harmony and arrangements. I dreamed of pieces that were much more composed, where all sorts of things happen: melodies, breaks, dissonances, polyphony, minimalism, silences, breaks, indistinguishable sounds, whispers, cries, contrasts. But, I also dreamed of introducing all sorts of new instrumentation: strings, wind instruments, etc.. I also fantasized of a music of “spectral” obedience, half day/half night, of chiaroscuro, crossed by mysterious sounds and it has a lot of ghostly appearance which opens up a little parallel world.

That said, my initial ambition was rather vague and imprecise; I had this poetry I had written a few months before that I wanted to set to music and use/explore the sounds I had on my keyboard. Above all, I wanted to clear an intermediate space between my desire for songwriting on the one hand and on the other, with a freeing up towards other, less familiar territories. I aspired to more sound experimentation in the “song” format by highlighting the instrumental and sound dimension. 

I composed this whole record with my Nord Electro keyboard that I had acquired a few months before and at that time, I wouldn’t have imagined for a second that this record was going to take this collective turn afterwards. Thanks to this new instrument, I could work on the melodic part (the skeleton, the backbone of the piece) but also imagine all sorts of possibilities in terms of arrangements and hear it immediately. At that moment, I felt a new space opening up for my music, but I didn’t think of these three weeks as a very first step and that it was going to grow into something else, something bigger than me.

When I was composing these little songs at that stage, I was pretty happy with what I’d been producing up to that point. There was something magical opening up for me, something obvious, due to two new parameters in my music: the sound of the keyboard which opened up a whole host of new sound possibilities for me and the exploration of French singing. Composing the music on the keyboard allowed me to hear live all sorts of arrangements I’d fantasised about. Singing in French was also completely new to me, and paradoxically opened me up to a parallel world that was totally unheard of.

Then I let this material rest for a few weeks and I played and shared these little songs in French to a few people. A friend of mine said that some electronic sounds shocked her a bit, especially those that tried to reproduce a real instrument, and it hit me immediately and allowed me to take a step back from what I’d created. 

It’s at the moment I decided to invite musicians to this project to give something else to these songs that new ambitions were born. I’ve been dreaming of collaborating with other musicians on my solo work for a while now (because I love working with other musicians who inspire me).

When I made the decision to work with other musicians on the arrangements for the album, it was totally exciting for me to consider a new stage in the project. I could really start fantasising about new arrangements for these songs, something I’d always more or less dreamt about for my music. It was the right time to contact a few musicians I’ve been in touch with in the past or who inspired me. Everything I’d imagined a few months earlier of a richer music could finally come true in a precise framework.

L’Inattingible is your most collaborative album to date, but it also happens to be perhaps your most personal and direct album where you’re singing in your native French language from texts and lyrics that you penned. Are there common thematic elements at play in the lyrics that you felt warranted a more direct approach? For you, what is L’Inattingible (The unattainable)?

I had a short writing period just before composing the music of L’inattingible. During this period of poetry writing, I didn’t necessarily have a very precise idea of what I wanted to talk about. I think I let myself be guided by the weight of words, sounds and associations of ideas. Themes emerged in the course of writing and rewriting, made of collage, montage and telescoping disparate fragments: fleeting impressions that are difficult to grasp, incommunicability, spectres, vacillations of inner states, the theme of near and far, the question of non-being (which did not happen) and absence. I tried to pay attention to all these states of turmoil and strangeness that I encountered at that time of writing.

But generally speaking, if there’s a common thread that undoubtedly links all these themes on this record, I think that this thread could point to something that one tries to reach, but that one never manages to reach, because this desire is too vast or impossible. There is undoubtedly — even if I don’t know exactly — a spiritual metaphor, of an impossible quest that forces us to go beyond what is known, in our relationship to desire. Perhaps, after all, the evocation of the title was also a way of going beyond, linked to the conception of this record, something that until then seemed impossible to achieve, but which I tried to overcome by doing so, by actually plunging into it. 

My writing was obviously nourished by reading. During the writing process, I was nourished by the poetic writing of Michaux, Anna de Noailles, Roberto Juarroz, Joe Bousquet, Pierre-Jean Jouve, René Char, Dante, Clarice Lispector, Ingeborg Bachmann, mystic writings too. But I will say that writing is also nourished by inner states, by fleeting sensations, but also by my interest in everything that touches on mysticism and interiorities; that is to say, opening the invisible behind appearances, the transcendent and the feeling of the infinite.

I don’t think that this is a properly autobiographical material (is it about me? I doubt it as I think we’re plural and always in state of changing); I don’t really know if my writing is nourished by my own experience and I didn’t want to go into confessionalism. It probably starts from certain states of my psychic life to which I wanted to highlight some features in order to move towards something more universal, no doubt. What interested me was to create a certain confusion and a certain gap in relation to different perceptive states that can be intermingled.

I see that in the short time that L’Inattingible was released, you also just posted a new album straight to Bandcamp called Mystères (non) révélés, which is a collection of songs that just feature you working with mostly piano, voice, and field recordings. Were these holdover songs from L’Inattingible, or were these recorded more recently with this separate release in mind? 

Mystères (non) révélés is a totally different thing from L’inattingible. It’s not outtakes at all from this record. The tracks from Mystères… were recorded a long time ago (approximately 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe more). I have no idea, in fact, exactly when it had been made. It’s more a collection of disparate material than a proper release, with a clear intention of mind, as I had with L’inattingible. I made some recent editing (like the addition of the field recordings) on the piano/vocal tracks that I rediscovered lately. 

For a long time I have wanted to work on my archival recordings and to make some of them available. Sometimes I’m too busy with the present time, with my current occupation. I have plenty of archival recordings and new ones that stay on my hard drive;  with the lockdown, due to having plenty of time, I thought to myself maybe it’ll be the right time to investigate these recordings more and make them available for those who would like to hear them. I think it’s a bit of a pity to keep them for myself only and I will probably make a subscription for fans only, to offer something attractive for them to have as exclusive releases. Maybe I’ll do that in the future, I don’t know yet.

I think Bandcamp is a great place to self-release these kinds of things, and to have all these things in one place, without caring anymore for physical objects. It’s not that I reject the physical object, but I think it’s not possible with all the material I have to make a physical release each time I make something available. I have an interest in ecology and the environment, and I think this question of the necessity of physical objects for each release needs to be thought through…if a label would be interested to release one of them, it’s totally possible.

That’s a hard question for me to think about as I have so much music. That’s where I am, for now. I need to investigate this platform and use its potentiality and we’ll see how it goes… Sometimes, I tell myself it’s a pity to not make physical releases for fans that are attracted to the objects, that the way of listening isn’t probably the same according to the support.

What’s the status of your Wild Silence label? Is that on hiatus or do you still have plans for future releases? I always appreciated the way you issued those releases in such beautifully packaged CD-R editions. I was sort of hoping more micro-labels might follow suit.

Thanks very much for your kind words. It has been one year that I haven’t made any new release on Wild Silence, and I don’t have any plans now for future release. When someone writes me and solicits me for a release, I tell them that the label is on hiatus or doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a hard question as I haven’t made the end of the label official or public.

For a short while, I thought to maintain the label on hiatus only, but finally I wondered if I will make new Wild Silence releases: I enjoyed the fact of running a label a lot, but it was a lot of work to make the releases physically (as it was made by myself or a printer who was located at my old place before I moved, so it’s also complicated now) and to make them public and promote them. The last two years of the label were very hard for in terms of sales and promotion. I had the impression that something has changed in the world of music and now with the new crisis, I think things will be worse and worse for selling these kinds of small items. It was hard to get any interest by promoters, maybe because of the format (of CDR) that was not fashionable enough as tapes or vinyl, I don’t really know. But it was hard to get some reviews and some releases were a bit hard to sell too (related to the beginning of the label). I sold less and less physical objects too…

I’m very occupied now with my own music (I have lots of old music to make available and lots of new projects in mind I would like to achieve). And there are also many fantastic labels out there that do a fantastic job, or release things I would have loved to release, so I prefer to retire now and focus mostly on my music and collaborations, and we’ll see afterwards if I come back again with new ideas and wishes.

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A few days after completing this interview with Delphine, we were approached about selecting an artist or two that we would like to see contribute a piece of music to AMPLIFY 2020, an online festival focused on new works recorded during the time of quarantine by sound artists from around the globe. Not only did Delphine generously agree to contribute something, but she also submitted this beautiful and haunting piece called ‘Lost in my dreams, a nightmare maybe’ within a quick period of time.