Delphine Dora’s D’une nostalgie inconnue feels ageless, almost archaeological. This music holds an interminable spirit, and listening to the album is like peering through a prism into another time. Dora’s voice is the beacon pulling us in, guiding us through improvised piano and harmonium pieces she recorded during a 2022 residency in rural Portugal. Street recordings are interlaced with the music, adding life and transporting us directly into these moments. It’s captivating.
I am continuously drawn to the quiet spectacle and emotional resonance of D’une nostalgie inconnue, its languid repetitions and solemn timbres. It’s both beautiful and forlorn. The album title, borrowed from a fragment of Pessoa, suits this collection perfectly. Dora’s journey through Portugal involved concerts, residencies, and extensive field recording, capturing waves from the Atlantic, voices in the streets, and songs escaping from a park. These anonymous and fleeting sounds become the raw materials of an interior landscape, a sensitive memory of place that is intuitive and vibrant rather than documentary.
D’une nostalgie inconnue is OUT NOW on A K T I.
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What are your earliest memories of sound? What were the sounds that first captured your attention as a child?
I don’t have many strong memories of sound from my childhood. I don’t think it was a sense I was particularly attuned to at the time. I was more visually oriented, or more sensitive to other senses, like smell or taste.
That said, the sounds that have stayed with me are things like storms —loud, violent sounds of nature rather than anything bucolic or calm. Those kinds of overwhelming, elemental noises seem to have left a deeper impression on me than music or everyday sounds.
When did you first begin making music, and what drew you to it? Can you remember the first instrument you played or the first sounds you created intentionally?
I began studying classical piano at the age of six and continued until I was about fifteen. I don’t really know how I ended up playing that instrument, or whether it was something that came from me or something my mother encouraged. What’s surprising is that I stayed with the piano for nine years, even though I was also doing classical dance at the same time, and gave that up after just one year.
I suppose I must have had some musical predisposition, even if I didn’t particularly enjoy the constraints of formal training, discipline, and structure. Still, there were certain pieces and composers I genuinely enjoyed playing more than others.
Much later, in my early twenties, after having stopped for a few years, I returned to the piano. That’s when I began creating personal pieces—small songs at first, then completely free and improvised song works, almost like a form of automatic writing, very outsider music in spirit. That’s where Delphine Dora was born.
An album documenting these very first attempts is available online; it’s called Floating Existence, and it bears witness to the genesis, the very beginning of that quest.
When did improvisation become central to your practice? What does improvisation allow you to access that composed work doesn’t?
Improvisation has always been central to my practice. For me, it’s not about a musical genre that has been institutionalized or formalized, but an inner necessity. It’s a way of being fully present, attentive to the moment, to the unexpected, and to the accidents that arise —without letting the mind control the music. Instead, I try to listen with my body and my soul to what emerges naturally, a blank state.
Since I started making music, about twenty years ago, this has been the path I want to follow: exploring unknown parts of myself, letting go, and allowing things to happen organically. Improvisation allows me to access something more authentic, something that resonates with a particular moment—a state of fragility and beauty that I try to capture as closely as possible. It’s almost a spiritual practice for me, connected to meditation and contemplation.
I’m always amazed by the magic of improvisation, by how it feels like I act more as a channel than as a fully conscious self. Composition comes afterward. It may emerge from a desire to fix certain forms or intentions, especially when recording, but improvisation always comes first: it must preexist thought. Whenever I’ve tried to compose without it, it felt false, overly intellectualized, and at odds with my way of making music.
You were invited to perform at the Appleton festival in Lisbon in 2022, which began this particular journey. What was your relationship with Portugal before that invitation? Did you have any sense of what the trip would become?
It was the first time in my life that I had been to Portugal and played there. I had absolutely no idea what the trip would be like. I just went with the flow and let myself wander wherever I wanted…
I like the idea of not having too many preconceived notions and letting yourself be surprised…
You describe the three-week journey as being “punctuated by three concerts, but above all by listening and collecting.” Can you talk about the difference between arriving somewhere to perform versus arriving to listen? How does that change what you’re open to?
If I had come only to give concerts, I would have been there solely to perform. But more and more, when I travel, I need to allow myself extra time—to settle, to slow down, to wander, to walk without a goal, and to be fully available to what surrounds me. That kind of openness requires mental space.
On tour, we often move from one date to the next, sometimes thousands of kilometers from home, without ever really knowing the places we pass through. I find that deeply frustrating, especially in the context of the ecological crisis. For me, staying longer in the places where I perform is a way of inhabiting them, of entering into a relationship with new environments, and of experiencing time and space differently.
Listening—through walking, through attention to atmospheres, through field recordings—is a way for me to slow down and to be present. Later, I would like to work with these collected materials, to recompose them, and to tell a story rooted in lived experience, while also projecting it elsewhere, toward another imaginary space.
The Osso residence in São Gregório is in rural Portugal. You spent about ten days there, mostly alone. What was that solitude like? How does being alone in an unfamiliar place affect what you hear and what you create?
I was in residence at São Gregório, in a very remote, rural area—no train station, no public transport, far from shops or bars. The residence itself was lovely, with large spaces to work in. I shared the place with a few artists who were working on their own projects, and I met some of the staff, but otherwise I spent ten days in relative isolation, which suited me perfectly. I’m used to solitude, so it didn’t bother me at all. I imagine it might be unsettling for artists accustomed to the city, but for me, it was exactly what I needed.
I had plenty of time to focus on new music. I improvised a lot, recorded new tracks, and allowed myself the mental space to create freely. I also took time to walk around the surrounding area.
I love the idea of being in exile, in an unfamiliar place; this sense of decentering is essential for my inspiration. It allows me to renew myself and explore dimensions I don’t yet know. Being alone also helps me refocus, creating a complementary effect that’s both refreshing and necessary for my creative process.
You describe these collected sounds as “anonymous and fleeting sounds, imbued with presence, which become the raw materials of an interior landscape.” Can you talk about what makes a sound feel “imbued with presence”? How do you recognize it?
By “presence,” I am referring here to the poet Kathleen Raine, whose work I had already drawn from in a poetic way on my albums Eudaimon and Eudaimon II.
For Kathleen Raine, presence has a poetic, spiritual, and metaphysical meaning. The world is not empty or mute; it is inhabited. From this perspective, the quality of presence I look for when collecting sounds can be felt when I listen to elements as living, inhabited phenomena, rather than as mere acoustic events.
What distinguishes an “inhabited” sound from one that is not? It is difficult to define rationally. Presence cannot really be explained — it is something that is experienced. It requires inner silence, attention, and a contemplative state of listening, an openness to the emergence of the unknown.
Sometimes a sound in itself is not spectacular or remarkable. But within a composition — when it enters into relation with other sounds, with a voice, an instrument, a melody, or even with silence — it can suddenly reveal a particular presence. Through these relationships, a sound can become charged, almost luminous, as if something hidden were allowed to appear.
In that sense, composition is not about highlighting sounds but about creating a space in which presence can emerge. I recognize it intuitively, through a feeling of resonance, when the sound seems to belong to a larger inner landscape and meets me rather than simply passing by.
You describe the pieces as “born in the moment, woven together in solitude.” When you’re improvising alone in a space like that, what are you listening to besides the instrument? Is the room part of the conversation?
When I improvise alone, I am listening first to my inner world. I try to attune myself to an inner silence, and at the same time to the silence around me — to the space that inhabits me as much as the one I inhabit.
The room is very much part of the conversation. It’s almost like chamber music, but with the architecture itself as a partner. For this recording, I was in a large room with a wooden floor and wide glass windows open to the outside, letting in light, air, and subtle sounds from beyond.
If I had recorded in a different kind of space — something narrower, more claustrophobic, darker — the music would inevitably have taken on a different mood, a different emotional and sonic character. The space shapes the way I listen, the way I play, and ultimately the music that emerges.
The field recordings and the instrumental pieces coexist in the album. How do you think about the relationship between the collected sounds and the music you created? Are they separate layers, or do they speak to each other?
I did record the field recordings and the music, which was improvised at the time, separately, but when I was creating the album, I had to make a selection from the field recordings I had made and the musical material I had recorded during the residency. It took quite a bit of work to listen back, select, and sequence everything, and then I decided to bring the two together and have them interact. It’s this intuitive interaction that constitutes the composition.
The phrase “poetic geography” is beautiful. How is a poetic geography different from an actual geography? What happens when geographical contours dissolve in favor of emotional geography?
In truth, I do not make sound documentaries. My ambition is not to create an objective or precise mapping of Portugal, nor to represent it in a documentary sense. Rather, I want to bring sonic elements from Portugal into my music, allowing them to enter into dialogue with one another, and with myself. I am interested in creating a conversation between inside and outside.
This geography is a sensitive one: it is emotional, perceptual, shaped by sound and visual imagination. It does not aim to locate or define, but to evoke. It can awaken memories in the listener, or, on the contrary, transport them elsewhere, toward an undefined place.
Traditional folk music often carries strong cultural and geographical markers. Your work, however, seems to generate a form of folk that is placeless, or perhaps inhabited by multiple places at once. Is this unmooring intentional, or does it emerge naturally from your creative process?
Yes, I agree with that idea of a folk music that is not fixed to a single place, or that seems to inhabit several places at once. I don’t think this was something I set out to do intentionally at first. Rather, it emerged over time through practice and through the gradual discovery of my own artistic identity. As my work evolved and my influences accumulated, this sense of “unmooring” became clearer, almost as a natural reflection of a personal, inner journey rather than a specific geographical attachment.
Traditional folk music often carries specific cultural and geographical markers. Your work seems to create a kind of placeless or many-placed folk. Is that an intentional unmooring, or does it emerge from the process itself?
It is true that my music is deeply inspired by folk. It is the music I listen to, and that moves me the most, and I have been influenced by folk traditions from many different countries. Yet my own music does not refer to a specific folklore or a particular nation. This was not a conscious decision at first. Quite naturally, after singing in English, I began singing in an imaginary language very early when I started music. Over time, this invented language became a kind of personal idiom, something that speaks directly to my identity.
Although I am French, my origins are elsewhere—Russian, Hungarian, Vietnamese, if we look at my ancestors. I have never really felt that I belonged to a single country. I feel more like a citizen of the world. I feel close to artists such as Ghedalia Tazartes in France, for example, who created music without borders, using an invented language, and sometimes singing poetry as I used to. Even though his music is different from mine, I find there are similarities in our work in some areas.
A relative said something to me recently that resonated deeply. He told me that my music feels as if it comes from a state of exile, but an exile filled with joy — the joy of being in the world. And that is exactly how I feel.
And lastly, as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Voices – spoken, sung, all the languages…sound of wind, of the water, of organs, piano, and string instruments… I don’t think I’ve got any favorites.
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