Eternal February: Delphine Dora (France)

Delphine Dora is a musical artist, composer and improviser from France. For more than 15 years, she has been developing an intimate and complex musical universe, situated at the crossroads of folk music, electroacoustic music, minimalism, improvisation, and a whole variety of other genres, and arranged between several languages (English, French, German, Russian, imaginary languages), making her one of the most curious and surprising souls on the European avant-folk scene. 

Curator of the Wild Silence label, Delphine Dora has recorded much of her music on audio cassettes in very limited, hand-picked editions. While the best-known of her orchestrated albums is L’inattingible (2020), considered by Julia Holter to be one of the best records of the decade, there are several dozen titles to her name as well as scattered collaborations, from a duet with Marina Gusina on the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian to noisy and avant-garde projects (playing with Andrew Chalk, Josephine Foster, Keiji Haino and Valentina Magaletti, among others). A self-taught visual artist and reader of rare sensitivity, she has devoted entire albums to translating the poetic works of her favourite poets into music, including Sylvia Plath, Kathleen Raine, Ingeborg Bachmann, Walt Whitman, and others. 

Equally at home with old pipe organs, synthesizers and keyboards, immersed in the atmosphere of churches and nature, Dora often becomes the voice of a place, at once embodied and ghostly, intimate and experimental. Her ecstatic litanies explore the subconscious of folk in forms of bliss both abstract and real, timeless ceremonies woven from voice and piano, bird chirps and rural sounds, electronic intuitions and barely perceptible drones. Close to Christina Carter, Brigitte Fontaine and Meredith Monk, Delphine Dora seems to evoke the American minimalists as much as Satie and Debussy, between fin de siècle phantasmagoria and avant-garde chiaroscuro. 

She has performed internationally in France, Europe, and Japan in many contexts such as Cafe OTO (London), Brotfabrik (Frankfurt), Instants Chavirés (Montreuil), Cave12 (Geneva), Ausland (Berlin), Zionskirche (Berlin), The Glad Cafe (Glasgow), Ateliers Claus (Brussels), Victoria Theatre (Halifax), Neue Schachtel (Stuttgart), Atriu Na Zizkove (Praha, CZ), l’église de St Saphorin (Switzerland), A.M.E (Huddersfield), Igreja de Santa Isabel (Lisbon), Sonoscopia (Porto), Bla (Oslo), Mutant Radio (Tbilisi), Polaris (Tokyo), etc. and festivals such as Meakusma Festival (Eupen), Appleton Festival (Lisbon), Le Guess Who (Netherlands), Fanø Free Folk Festival (DK), Supernormal Festival (UK), Copenhagen Jazz Festival (Denmark), Times Zone Festival (Bari, Italy).
Website: ​​https://delphinedora.wordpress.com/

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Doors: 7pm
Event: 7:30pm

General admission: £22

The Eternal series is supported by The Richard Thomas Foundation.

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Curated by Sasha Elina, the Eternal series of music events and multi-disciplinary situations is a London-based project (since 2024) that aims to present and support diverse perspectives, communities, and artistic provocations. It welcomes the audience to join a movement that accommodates both emerging and established artists, bridging the classical and the novel. Music, theatre, dance, moving image, sound art, poetry and their crossovers enter the Eternal series, with no limits or genre restrictions.

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