"Delphine Dora may be one of the more unlikely AMPLIFY 2020 participants, as compared to previous contributors her work has increasingly steered towards more outwardly folk and pop song forms. In fact, 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. If you haven’t heard that album yet, carve out some time to check it out. It’s truly magical.
But, to refer to Dora as a songwriter, and a songwriter alone, is grossly misleading. Start combing through her back catalog and you’ll uncover a startling range of material. Through solo and collaborative releases on her self-run label, Wild Silence, to more poetry driven works and other efforts with Sophie Cooper and Bruno Duplant, you’ll find an artist that is working across a broad range of styles that often times straddles the lines between jazz, improvisation, modern classical, avant folk, ambient, field recordings, etc. Ultimately, her body of work displays a pure love affair with sound, which at the end of the day is why we are all here, right? When asked recently about what she has been doing during this quarantine period, she wrote that from her countryside location in France one of the things has been “...deeply and carefully listening to the sounds outside - the birds singing - and trying to savour the subtlety and beautiful quality of sound around.” With that, Delphine has submitted a piece for AMPLIFY 2020 titled ‘lost in my dreams, a nightmare maybe’ that was composed between April 26-28 using piano, keyboards, modular synth, objects, field recordings, vocals."
(David Perron)
Produced for the great serie "AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine".
amplify2020.bandcamp.com
Special thanks to David Perron (Free Form Freakout), Jon Abbey (Erstwhile), Matthew Revert and Vanessa Rossetto.
"It begins with chirping grasshoppers, and a hazy buzz. A quiet piano nudges in, followed by a variety of vocal, water, wind, and unidentifiable sounds. Indeed, the fabricated and the “natural” sounds blend into a single slowly churning morass. Polyphonic voices lend the piece an air of ghostliness, or of fractured memories. Other more musical elements (keyboards, synth) likewise lend some humanity to the track, but also strangely elevate it from the birds and splashes. It is difficult to pierce the veil, here, but maybe that is the point. Lost in my dreams, a nightmare is all veil. It is all blur and dream. Dora calls this a nightmare, and the track certainly progresses into heavier, more menacing territory including a mimicked a dog growl. Presumably this is a reference to the chimerical figure in the included artwork. Then again, the piece concludes with soothing sounds of water dropping onto a tinny surface. Maybe the nightmare is itself is lost in the dream and is therefore diluted. Maybe the rain actually washes it away. Either way, lost in my dreams, a nightmare is appropriately eerie (and what dream is not), but ultimately serene". - Nick Ostrum (Free Jazz webzine)