Delphine Dora – Eudaimon

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This is a sparse beauty. Eudaimon explores the magic and mysticism of Kathleen Raine‘s poetry in multi-tracked voice and unadorned piano. Delphine Dora‘s borrowed words melt in a melancholic sweetness, floating out on a mandolin of needled ivory.

The Nico comparisons are hard to avoid, but Dora’s muse is less frost-damaged, eking a warm and inviting glow, like Finland’s Lau Nau or kuupu. A voice imbued with a magic that fireflies, flutters with forgotten faces, burns with an untutored uniqueness.

In the lullaby quality of “Honesty” or the hypnotising vivisection of “Who Are We”, the weave is a simplistic one, honest. Notes seem to trickle like light-caught brooks, crystal clear, the perfume of camomile furnishing the mind as “Lament”‘s waltzing fingers meander through that ohhh(ing) voile.

A gentle lilt that conjures quite a spell, finds passage in the duet of “On A Deserted Shore”, for example, its multiple personalities falling into an unembellished bleed of lonely harmonics that spirals you intimately in, magnetically affixes. The folklore embering of “Fire”, “The Invisible Kingdom”‘s gothic folds, the tattered Teutonics of “No-Where” caged in a minimalistic tonal patter of repetition (the comforting crease of repetition that milks the vast expanse); yeah, there’s plenty to love here.

Every song has its own hue, tonally paints, plucks at Raine’s symbolism; the blossoming, the decay, the austere mirage that is “The Unloved”, a bat-like swoop of overlaid words to diminutive stabs of note. One of those wild-wooden-cabins of a record, a campfire to keep the wolves at bay.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-