Review by Brad Rose (Foxy Digitalis) : "Quiet, intimate moments become points of departure on this 32-minute spell from the always great Delphine Dora. There’s something cryptic in the way she weaves disparate musical elements into the everyday sounds scratching their way into the forefront. A distant melody is ghostly adding to the feeling that A l’abri du monde is haunted as if Dora accidentally captured a hidden world from long ago in these recordings. There are so many ideas here to digest and explore that the journey feels different each time I listen."

Allnightflight records :
"Another pearl on Jon Collin’s Early Music press, this time from French composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist Delphine Dora. The full length piece ‘A l'abri du monde’ was recorded ’19 and ’21 from around the French ecological park Val d'Allier Ecopole. It captures the both the human and natural elements of the reserve and interrogates the relationship between the city (and its inhabitants) and the natural ecosystem - wind flutters whilst birds chirp, a remote control car whizzes by and conversations hover. Full disclosure, I’m a total sucker for this stuff - where the boundaries of everyday sound environments are frayed and augmented - hovering subliminally where the tinkering of piano keys amongst the bustle of city life take on extra significance. Here Dora subtly deploys the instruments and electronics in her arsenal to deft effect, super low-level drones and flutters of prepared ivory keys placed and collaged carefully within the natural sound picture. It’s a piece of music we should wish would go on for infinity, similar in approach to Pierre Mariétan’s street level musique concrete epic ‘Rose Des Vents’, Graham Lambkin / Jason Lescalleet or the more recent calming tonic from The Gerogerigegege on The Trilogy Tapes where less certainly leads to more. Too good.. handmade edition of hardly any."


The Wire (Issue 459, May 2022) by Bill Meyer :

« Delphine Dora developed A l’Abri du Monde from two years of recordings that she made at the Val d’Allier Ecopôle, a park near the city of Clermont Ferrand in central France. Once the site of a gravel quarry, it has been rehabilitated into a place where birdwatchers can observe herons and local residents can stroll its plank-paved pathways. A l’Abri du Monde translates as Sheltered From The World. The title articulates what Ecopôles patrons might say they’re seeking when they come to visit, but the piece, which lasts just under 33 minutes and is released by Jon Collin’s Early Music label, aspires to more complicated responses than simply yearning to make the nature scene.
If you do an image search for the Ecopôle, you’ll find vistas of woods and wetlands. The sounds of flora and fauna are well represented by the field recordings, but Dora makes sure that human activity is equally well represented. She’s layered more collected sounds,, including footsteps, distant vehicles, and unidentified machinery. Additionnaly, she has added sparse keyboards and wordless vocals, pushing threads of wistful, remote music through the broader sonic fabric.
The effect is initially lulling, but the further in you go, the less natural the juxtaposition sound. Places like the Ecopôle offer people a restorative refuge from everyday urban life. But who is being sheltered, and from the world? Are the visitors being sheltered from the harsch demand of an urban life that has evolved from a desperate wish not to sleep rough and live off the land ? Or is the natural world being shielded from the same forces that gouged the holes where water now flows, by the same species that did the gouging ? Rehabilited is a funny word for such a place. That’s what you do to criminals to reduce recidivism, right ? What crime did the land commit ? Dora’s work invites questions, but leaves it to the listener to consider uncomfortable answers. »

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

"A l'abri du monde was made from a series of recordings made between 2019 and 2021 at the Val d'Allier Ecopole. Located on the edge of a large river, the 140-hectare site, at the gateway to the Clermont-Ferrand agglomeration (center of France) once dedicated to the extraction of aggregates (sand and gravel), has recently undergone an ecological rehabilitation. The quarries have been replaced by two large ponds which now host numerous species of migratory birds and a rich biodiversity. The surroundings of this location is relatively urbanized and a sand quarry is still in operation a short distance from the large pond. It is now primarily a place for local residents to walk and for birdwatchers to observe.
This piece reflects my interest in the specificity of a site, the sounds of the environment, the liminal spaces between city and nature, the disappearance of certain birds species. I drew from this astonishing place to feed my sound imagination and redeploy a personal cartography.
My first motivation was to become more aware of my sound environment, creating a subjective interpretation of the place through a poetic and subjective listening.
The real issues of this landscape have a double interest, as it presents a successful hybridization between nature and culture. Hybrid place: on the one hand, natural site favorable to contemplation, experimental space with ecological vocation (bird observatory, place of fishing and organic market gardening), created in response to the environmental mutations in progress (degradation and climatic change); on the other hand, extremely sensitive site threatened by the noise nuisances related to the road traffic, perceptible noises of the quarry of extraction, human and industrial activities in the vicinity (companies, stores). It is from the richness of the sound complexity of this place, from multiple sound recordings at different places of the landscape, from a careful listening to the details of the environment and from the interaction with the sound matter of the place, that each sound was captured in a haphazard way or carefully selected for its suggestive potential, arranged later - revealing delicate complexities.
I sought to interrogate the liminal spaces between sound and silence, making one feel that sense of quietude, away from urban agitation and that silence threatened by human activity. The atmosphere of this place also translated a striking social and political off-field: the lightness of certain recorded words or scenes of life could contrast with certain political demonstrations or social events that took place during the period of the recording (such as the Black Lives Matter strike or the Covid 19 period).
Although the Anthropocene and the effects of human activities on animal species and the landscape, and more generally on the relationship between humans and non-humans was an important preoccupation, my primary interest was to question the way in which the sounds we perceive convey a subjective reality and can become inscribed in the memory and imagination of the listener, reconnecting with the sensitive experience, through an interaction between the "active" listening of a place and the creative voice it brings.
I have thus musicalized the sound material by adding voices, acoustic instruments (piano, prepared piano) and electronic instruments (analog synthesizer, keyboard, electronic sounds...), blurring the boundaries between instrumentation and field recordings, in order to restore the environment crossed, to create an in-between, a sound space between real/imaginary, concrete/ abstract reality, visible/invisible."
--- Delphine Dora