Wild Silence is a label run by Delphine Dora. Not settled on any particular genre or mode of playing, it instead releases a diverse range of recordings, from Delphine’s own piano explorations to the wilder territory of Mami Wata’s haunting voice and glassworks. The label’s two most recent releases are typically captivating.
Lodz is an alias of Pauline Nadrigny , working in piano and electronics. Her music on ‘Settlement’ is composed sparsely but still conjures a lushness of sound. Electronics like pixelated breath. Looped wordless vocals. Sung/spoken poetry; the piano making melodic ladders for the words to ascend. Metallic squeals. Multi-tracked voices, doubling and chattering like birds alighting on a fence. Ringing feedback tones. Microphone thuds. Field recordings of rain and bells. Theremin-like sustained choral sighs. Cars swishing over wet roads. Clipped, pinched vocal-delivery in the more conventional song-form moments. Childrens’ voices, sharp whistles and calls. Gongs tolling in double bursts of bass resonance. Whisper-babble. Splashy thumb-piano. Sunshine drone and quaking rumbles. Dialogue at the edge of breathlessness.
All tied together within brackets of silence. There is a sparkling stillness sustained throughout ‘Settlement’. The experience of listening to it is like having a strong light shining in your eyes, a feeling of being unanchored and floating in a glare. A work of beautiful, understated avant-pop songs, loosely woven.
Clouds Once Before Molten Rock – Live in Alsager is a recording of an improvised performance from this scratch psych orchestra. The band features, among others, Sophie Cooper, Delphine Dora, Kelly Jayne Jones and Mika de Oliveira, deploying a diverse instrumentation of Walkman, trombone, electronics and trombone, amid a multitude of other sound-making objects.
Beginning with drone swirls, keening whistling scratches, and clanging and rustling, resembling the tuning-up of a space-chamber ensemble. The at-first tentative melding of minds and expression proceeds unhurried. A twanging koto knotting the disparate whisps together with a constant taut dextrousness amid all the gaseous drift. A vocal gaggle and soft plangent song joins. Rattling percussion. The hiss and burble of electronics. A melodious languageless chant begins at some obscure signal. The brassy breath of trombones. Acid-etched scrawls of dissonance.
A mass-improvisation of real emotional heft and beauty. A four/five-note motif comes and goes (depending on which instrument picks it up) and forms a winding path through the dense thickets of activity. Plunging your ears into the undergrowth is often essential to pick out individual contributions making up this captivating long-form sound séance. Around half way there is a blaring density created by Sophie Cooper’s trombone that surges up in bright neon pink from the soft relenting ground-fog that had previously roiled around undisturbed.
‘Live in Alsager’ is a brilliant long-form sound-weave, an industrious looming of bioluminescent strands forming a real continuity of action, a group of busy spiders making a bizarre and wonderful web to a moment-by-moment plan, conceived by chaotic committee.
