'Best', I cannot fairly determine, but I can at least make an accurate claim to L'ineluctable pulsation du temps being one of my favourite albums by Delphine Dora, a 'classic' sounding artist/composer made essential for her clear interest in the outsider and abstruse. This new record for Marionette, and something like - maybe! - her fiftieth overall since debuting in the early 2000s, is entirely instrumental and positioned around her playing of a Nord Electro keyboard. The results are ethereal and frequently meditative, caught in a suspended inner world between new age drift, Berlin School modulation, and modern classical composition. Why this stands out in what is already a high quality and densely populated catalogue is perhaps driven by personal preference - Dora's playing here feels entirely non-showy and unself-conscious in ways that speak to my interest in the wrong way of doing the right kind of thing (or is that the other way around?). Ability is not in question here, but application is most important, each discrete piece pulsing along with its own subtly inferred sense of transcendence, not one for the big gestures but somehow of the capacity to conjure them anyway. A stirring record very easily lost within.
FFO: Willem Nyland, Juho Toivonen, Laraaji, Sylvain Chauveau
