Delphine Dora & Mocke

L'Invisible Est Multiforme

Genre: FOLK / ROOTS, MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

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Boomkat Product Review:

We continue to be completely spellbound by Delphine Dora’s singular re-imagining of folk, sacred and incidental musics, this time working in collaboration with Dominique Dépret to cast a seemingly everlasting spell where her quietly rogue vocal meanderings intersect a shimmering array of acoustic instruments like a sermon delivered straight to the heart.

The album is a follow-up to Delphine Dora & Dominique Dépret’s ‘Le Corps Défendent’ (2017), which first mapped out their oneiric cartography in the most wistful gallic terms somewhere between Heather Leigh’s slide guitar meditations and Jon Collin’s post-blues travels.

They pick up the thread again at an old church in village of Mauzun in the Puy-de-Dôme of Occitan France, where the spirits of local and imported folk and chamber styles intermingle thru webs of hazily open-tuned guitar, keys and wordless vocal melodies. Their effect is richly dream-textured and effortlessly transportive, forming a lush tapestry that induces a sense of time slipping and summons old ghosts to the surface, manifest in their grasp of a gorgeous tonal language heavily seasoned with bittersweet folk given to sundazed psychedelic wanderlust.

The duo are possessed of a rare psych-folk essence that riddles this one like threads of mycelium. They lower the lights, draw us in close to the stage with ‘Ce vivant possède une âme’, the album’s longest piece and scene-setter for an instrumentally captivating style of narration. Delphine’s cadence carries proceedings in languorous, pitching contours coupled to Mocke’s slide guitar and her own keyboard tonalities. Together they make the air sing and wheeze, swaying into tremolo-traced portrayals of widescreen country on ‘Le monism best un humanisme’, imprinting their locality in the puckered folk elegance of ‘Le destin de toute parole solitaire’.

Passages of hallucinatory chamber classical and arcane slants on church music unfurl as the record weaves into its more fractured 2nd half, flowing into the caverns of classical minimalism and pastoral vignettes that sign off a stunning album.

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