Tip! *300 copies limited edition* An'archives presents Kagome Kagome, the first collaboration between France's Delphine Dora and Japan's Ayami Suzuki - a deep album of prayer and magic that feels mysteriously dislocated from our time, channeling otherworldly beauty through voice, harmonium, and electronics. Dora arrives with two decades of idiosyncratic releases for labels including Modern Love, Morc, and Recital, alongside collaborations with Michel Henritzi and Sophie Cooper. Suzuki operates within Japan's improvised music tradition through work with Takashi Masubuchi, Tomo, and Leo Okagawa, while drawing from folk song, ambience, and claustrophobic drone.

The two artists met during Dora's May 2024 tour of Japan, having already established contact around shared concepts of "otherworldliness" and "impermanence." As Suzuki explains, they "explored the relationship between 'the invisible' and sound in Japanese culture - a common interest we share." Recording took place over several days in Kanumi, Tochigi prefecture, at a space called Center. The sessions centered around a vintage 104-year-old harmonium from Nippon Gakki Seizo Co. that had just been repaired. "It was as if the harmonium had been waiting for Delphine to draw sound from it," Suzuki recalls. "I felt it was a beautiful relationship where they could guide each other."

That sense of channeled communication permeates Kagome Kagome. Dora's harmonium provides the album's wheezing, ancient spine, while Suzuki's free-floating voice and gaseous electronics wrap around its tonality. Their voices nestle together with uncanny synchronicity - "when we sang together in a tunnel," Suzuki notes, "there were times when we sang the exact same melody without planning. It happened so naturally that the boundaries between us became blurred." The album takes its title from a Japanese children's song, with track titles constituting the song's lyrics in alternating Japanese (Romanized) and French. Urban legend connects "Kagome Kagome" to the Nikko Toshogu Shrine, near Center, which the duo visited during their residency. "The mysterious lyrics of 'Kagome Kagome' and its puzzle-like connection to Nikko Toshogu were a perfect fit for this mysterious album," Suzuki reflects, "which I think has its own kind of puzzle-like elements."

This is music of divination and ritual, possessing the eerie otherness that connects it to channelers of ghostly mystery like Nico, Kendra Smith, and Charalambides. Yet Kagome Kagome exists in its own liminal space - where French experimentalism meets Japanese spiritual practice, where ancient instruments commune with contemporary electronics, where two voices become one voice becomes something beyond human utterance entirely.