L’inéluctable pulsation du temps finds Delphine Dora pausing inside the rush that its title names. Known for a body of work that threads between modern classical, folk, ambient and spoken or sung poetry, the French composer and multi‑instrumentalist here offers a rare suite of purely instrumental keyboard pieces, recorded in 2018 at the height of a relentlessly busy period of touring and travel. At the same time, she had left the noise of the city for the hush of a village in the French countryside; the album is born from that tension, caught between the accelerated schedules of performance and the slow, immersive listening of her new surroundings. Where much of her earlier work leaned on the grain of the voice and the intimacy of text, this collection uses keys and electronics to articulate inner monologues that words could only fix in place.
Conceived as the instrumental counterpart to L’Inattingible, her most ambitious vocal album, L’inéluctable pulsation du temps documents Dora’s deep dive into the Nord Electro as both instrument and laboratory. Its palette of organs, electric pianos and synthetic timbres becomes a field for rich, overlapping polyphonies that clearly nod to the traditions of repetitive music and minimalism without ever simply quoting them. Thin, sustained drones often lie at the root, steady tones that behave like held breaths or distant horizons; above them, arpeggios bloom, loop and subtly mutate, their steady cycles gradually revealing tiny hesitations, accents and harmonic sidesteps. It is music built on repetition, but never on stasis: each pass through a pattern tilts the emotional colour a little further, as if time itself were being gently refracted.
The track titles draw from Hartmut Rosa’s reflections on acceleration and alienation, and the pieces feel haunted by those ideas. Some passages evoke a strangely enchanted clockwork, glittering and bright, where the forward push of time is exhilarating, almost playful. Elsewhere, the same insistence shades into something more disquieting: harmonies darken, phrases elongate just beyond comfort, and the sense of being propelled gives way to the sensation of being carried along faster than you might choose. Dora’s touch and phrasing are crucial to this ambiguity. Her playing is precise yet never clinical; tiny rubato, overlapping note‑tails and delicately blurred attacks soften rigid grids into something more bodily and vulnerable, as if the instrument were registering both heartbeat and thought.
Compared to the more melancholic, voice‑centred albums that preceded it, L’inéluctable pulsation du temps is strikingly colourful and rhythmic, an aural mille‑feuille of stacked textures and interlocking lines. Episodes of dreamlike suspension give way to more haunted vistas, then back again, as if the listener were moving through a series of rooms in the same house, each with its own light and pressure. The rural setting, Dora’s background in Outsider Art and Art Brut, and her ongoing practice of deep listening in nature all make themselves felt in the way she balances structure with intuition: the pieces are clearly composed, yet they retain the freshness of something discovered rather than imposed. In mirroring the double experience of a world speeding up and a self seeking refuge in slowness, the album turns the “ineluctable pulsation of time” into a quietly radical proposition - that within its inevitability there is still room for attention, nuance and pockets of transcendence.
