Delphine Dora is a French musician,
vocalist, improviser, composer, and sound artist.

Based in France and releasing music since the 00’s, Delphine’s remarkable solo and collaborative projects loosely connect modern classical, folk, ambient, and poetic writing. Drawing from an academic background in Outsider Art and Art Brut, this self-taught pianist and vocalist cultivates an intimate, multifaceted, and ever-evolving musical world that blends various genres and languages, focusing on a hybrid music incorporating vocal and instrumental elements, field recording, the use of acoustic space, and silence.

Delphine has released much of her music on cassette in very limited 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, her prolific calendar of performances and over twenty album releases range from sound experimentation to introspective exploration. She is the founder and artistic director of the “Wild Silence” label, and has collaborated on record and in concert with various French and international musicians, from a duet with Marina Gusina on the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian to noisy and avant-garde projects with Andrew Chalk, Josephine Foster, Keiji Haino, Wolf Eyes and Valentina Magaletti, among others. She also works on interdisciplinary projects such as drawing-and-sound performances with children’s author and visual artist Élis Wilk, and spoken word performances with writers Charles Robinson and poet Amy Cutler.

She has devoted entire albums to translating the poetic works of her favourite poets into music: Sylvia Plath (Conversation among the ruins, 2013), Kathleen Raine (Eudaimon, 2018), Ingeborg Bachmann (Dunkles Zu Sagen, 2019), Walt Whitman (Multitudes I-II, 2013-2017), not to mention adaptations of verses by Baudelaire, Saint-John Perse, Georg Trakl, Verlaine or Novalis, according to a literary sensibility that extends as far as Beckett’s Sarah Kane and Molloy.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. Close to Christina Carter, Brigitte Fontaine and Meredith Monk, Delphine seems to evoke the American minimalists as much as Satie and Debussy, between fin de siècle phantasmagoria and avant-garde chiaroscuro. This is music without premeditation, a personal cartography made up of radiant flows of incandescence, fragile and iridescent impressions, at the very limit of musicality.

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), l’église de St Saphorin (Switzerland), A.M.E (Huddersfield), Polaris (Tokyo), and at festivals such as Meakusma Festival (Eupen), Appleton Festival (Lisbon), Le Guess Who / invited by Julia Holter (Netherlands), Fanø Free Folk Festival (DK), Supernormal Festival (UK), Copenhagen Jazz Festival (Denmark), Times Zone Festival (Bari, Italy)…

LISTEN TO DELPHINE’S WORK HERE

Each rare Monica Brooks performance is a treasured event. Often confined to infrequent performances in the improv/free/alternative music scene at small, non-commercial out-of-the-way spaces, her music – whether playing harmonium in the women’s super-group Great Waitress or performing solo piano – refutes every lazy stereotype asserting that free improv/jazz is necessarily harsh, strident or inaccessible. Though Monica’s personal style is understated & unassuming, her solo piano is unfiltered romanticism, as perfect & endless as a shimmering waterfall tumbling through pure air, sparkling onto soft green-covered rocks & cascading away in an endless silver stream.

As well as regularly collaborating with seminal figures of the Sydney experimental community; Laura Altman, Jim Denley and Chris Abrahams among them, Brooks is an accordionist in avant-collective, Great Waitress.