Delphine Dora is a prolific composer, improviser and musician who has released on a plethora of labels including Recital, Morc, Sloow Tapes, Feeding Tube, Okraïna and more. Le Grand Passage is a stunning set of songs for piano and voice, recorded in one take without overdubs or edits, contrasting gilded piano motifs with improvised and abstracted vocal expressions, channeling the divine. Delphine Dora was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when a technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerized by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, "something greater than myself." The result is some of the most unusual but elevated material the prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has ever recorded, rooted in a deep understanding of European musical history but willing to push at its boundaries, questioning the earthly logic of life and death, asceticism and impiety. Baroque paradigms bleed into fragile, introspective mantras, expressed through a made-up language of existential yearning and channeled through piano and voice. It's music that caresses the sublime, made without any premeditation. Dora conjures affecting, plainspoken poetry, like a bedside diary written in a hypnagogic, delirious state: a stream-of-unconsciousness, channeling the beyond. The album title connects to a book dedicated to French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who famously pored over global religions to ascertain spiritual truths. To Weil, meditation was a passage to access mystical experience, or a bridge between humanity and divinity. In Dora's hands, this idea is a corridor between herself and the listener, a liminal place where she's able to address feelings without making anything explicit. The title, of course, also refers to life, its impermanence, finitude, and fragility, presenting the complex, multidimensionality of being through one of the most undiluted, unbridled set of songs imaginable. RIYL Andrew Chalk, Virginia Astley, Dominique Lawalrée, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. Mastered by Rashad Becker.
© 2021 bentcrayonrecords.com, llc.
