Thursday 24 July 2014, 8pm
Delphine Dora is a versatile and iconoclast musician, improvising mostly with voice and piano. Apart the piano, her main instrument, she plays also harmonium, organ, harpsichord, keyboard, melodica and violin. Since 2005, she has issued a large number of recordings in broad stylistic character. Also on the bill are Áine O'Dwyer - an instrumentalist and singer, a long time member of the Irish free folk collective United Bible studies and collaborator of numerous musical projects including The Cloisters, Mark Fry and the A-Lords; and Sophie Cooper - a West Yorkshire based musician whose main interest is in experimenting with conventional song writing. Cooper's music is written to reflect her life and more often than not is inspired by the people around her. The songs have a dreamlike quality, with sounds and vocals drifting in and out of clarity.
Delphine Dora is a versatile and iconoclast musician from France, improvising mostly with voice and piano. She plays also other instruments like keyboard, organ, melodica, glockenspiel.... Her works that explores different musical genres, ranges mainly between piano works, songs based on poetry, or vocal works sung in glossolalia.
Recent projects include the cover of « folk songs » album by Luciano Berio/Cathy Berberian, a concept album featuring songs inspired by fictional characters such as Beckett's Molloy and Zelda Fitzgerald, a Sylvia Plath poems setting to songs (Conversation Among The Ruins), a piano solo record (A Stream Of Consciousness), a set of jazz related improvisations recorded with double bassist Bruno Duplant and clarinetist Paulo Chagas (Onion Petals as Candle Light) and she co-directed a project of improvised songs performed by children (Les Loustics - Les Squelettes).
Besides her solo work, she collaborated with musicians such as Half Asleep, Salvatore Borrelli, Bruno Duplant, Paulo Chagas, Eloise Decazes (Arlt) and she has performed with Lau Nau, James Blackshaw, Baby Dee, Liam Singer, Sophie Cooper, Aine O’Dwyer. She's also the founder of Wild Silence label.
"Instant Classic ! I have no idea what language Dora is singing in – it might be french or it might be not a language – but listen to the expression and you know exactly what she is saying. It’s like listening to 19th century-german lieder, except easier to enjoy. Not because the longest track is 2:55. Probably because she is writing for her own voice, and manipulates it effortlessly like a wizard – the best kind of vocalist. The piano is restrained – mostly playing a traditional harmonic rôle to support the voice – allowing the voice a landscape in which to emote all over you. The songs are short, as they have captured a moment." - Julia Holter - L.A Magazine
O’Dwyer is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is informed by both the conceptual concerns of sound art and traditional composition techniques, embracing the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment. She has created works for large-scale and intimate settings that allow for both planned and unplanned compositions to co-exist in live situ. Recent works include 'Poems for Daedalus’ , a series of site-specific performances developed in Athens 2018; the book 'Poems for play', a collection of scores for a Jesuit monastery; 'Accompaniment for Captives’ , a performance for two fishing boats; 'Performance for Live Stream' (Cafe OTO, 2021), an audio-visual work; 'Song of Place' (2022) a street opera staged in Bristol suburbia and ‘Sing in the Dark’ ( 2024 ) a live vocal performance for acousmonium.
https://aineodwyer.bandcamp.com/
Sophie Cooper is a sound artist who Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf//) refer to as “A crucial member of Yorkshire’s far-reaching experimental music scene”. Sophie’s practice pivots around new presentations of acoustic instrumentation (primarily the trombone) with electronics, challenging conventions around composition, text placement and performance.
In recent years, Sophie has been particularly interested in publicly engaged, site specific, audio work, often in collaboration with visual artists. She has had work exhibited at The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Wordsworth Grasmere Museum, Bury Art Gallery, Hereford Courtyard Art Centre and Gallery Frank as well as music venues including Cafe Oto and hcmf//.
