On her latest album, Delphine Dora is concerned with temporality, its pace and pressures it produces. L’ineluctable pulsation du temps finds the French pianist, composer and improviser summoning a gentle collection of piano cycles with drone undertows. The record took shape during a time of intense touring, while Dora was simultaneously busy engaging with writings on acceleration and alienation by Hartmut Rosa, a “sociologist of speed”. According to Rosa, capitalist societies are programmed for constant economic growth, which forces us into a rat race, approaching the world instrumentally and as a competition. It may sound too esoteric for a German sociologist, but Rosa proposes a different mode of encountering the world, based on active and attentive presence, which he calls ‘resonance’. In other words, it’s about unlocking ourselves to affection. This must have touched Dora, a Parisian who more than a decade ago relocated to a village in rural France. She has used Rosa’s vocabulary as inspiration for track titles like ‘Désynchronisation’ on L’ineluctable pulsation du temps.
Different temporalities are woven into the album’s composition: brisk, fleeting cycles of piano arpeggios, as if chasing the foam of days, are, at least from the second third of the album, layered with sustained droning synths, symbolising the persistence of time. Dora’s piano style has often been characterised by melodic and instrumental asceticism, but on L’ineluctable pulsation du temps piano melodies are generous and colourful. She has been releasing music since the mid-2000s via labels such as Okraïna, Three:four, Modern Love or her own Wild Science imprint. Delivering into her catalogue is like opening a spiritist’s cabinet, and the reward is a sense of wonder, full of dreamy folk lullabies with murmuring vocals, avant-garde treasures or old pipe organ improvisations recorded in churches around Europe, which over time grew more complex.
L’ineluctable pulsation du temps was composed in 2018, around the time Dora was working on her collaborative 2020 album L’inattingible, which was praised by Julia Holter and presented Dora’s most ambitious work in terms of instrumentation and personnel. Her voice is entirely absent on the new album, but the opening ‘Ubiquité’ features Aby Vulliamy’s sublime tones on musical saw, which distantly echoes Dora’s previous lullabies. It’s the only addition to the album. Otherwise it’s just Dora, her piano and Nord Electro keyboard.
It is not the first time Dora has been concerned with temporality through drone-oriented compositions, as on her previous, 2020 album In Illo Tempore. Her approach to piano on the latest record can also recall albums like 2012’s A Stream of Consciousness. L’ineluctable pulsation du temps is best when these approaches meet halfway, as in pieces like ‘L’accélération ineluctable’ or ‘Les jours liquides’. This is when Dora evokes ethereal minimalism by Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi, who employed medieval tonality and “shadowy vocals”. However, the serene experience can in other pieces slip into an alienating sense of background listening. Even though L’ineluctable pulsation du temps doesn’t carry the unsettling qualities of her previous solo or collaborative releases, it still gives plenty of moments to resonate with.
