Dora Bleu is the re-crystallizing of Dorothy Geller's sounds from Axa Hour (Fire Museum), From Quagmire (VHF Records) and Laconic Chamber (Camera Obscura.)
Recent collaborators are: Sam Shalabi, Alex St Onge, Gordon Allen, Salvatore Borrelli, Simon Wickham-Smith and Helena Espvall.
Axa Hour is a collaboration with Alex St-Onge (upright), Brooke Crouser (electric guitar, piano, vibes and...), Francis Amirault (percussion and...), Justin Evans (rhodes and...)
Influences
Adrienne Rich, dripping water, leaky pipes, scratching rodents, Brothers Quay, Peter Kowald, Sun Ra, Stockhausen, Roxy Music, Terry Riley, Rowland S. Howard, Nikki Sudden, Lydia Lunch, Danceteria, Dadamah, Luce Irigiray, Louis Althusser, Amiri Baraka, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Annette Peacock, Tower Recordings, Helena Espvall, Simon Joyner, Bill Callahan, Cynthia Dall, Gastr del Sol, Kawabata Makoto, Sandra Bell, Art Bears, DAF!, Joy Division, Brian Eno, Nico, John Cale, Alice Coltrane, child abuse, imperial power, broken technologies, solitude, sadomasochism, Eric Satie, Can, Neu, Peter Jefferies, David Cronenburg, Pink Floyd, Movietone, Pelt, Scorces, Elliot Smith, Lou Barlow, Two Foot Flame, Set Fire to Flames, Com. Parvati, Subcommandante Marcos...
Sounds Like
12 December 2007, Dora Bleu (Ikuisuus 2008)
Live recording with Alexandre St-Onge on double bass.
To order: Ikuisuus
Clones of Eros, Axa Hour of Dora Bleu (Fire Museum 2007)
"The overall mood is malevolent and dark. The self-evidently vicious 'gashed and bloodletted' is exemplary: it contrasts the savage lyric delivered in Geller's faux-innocent breathy vocals with accompanying eldritch whines of the instruments. It's a sound as comforting as the creak of a noose held taught by a twisting corpse." The Wire
To order: Museum Fire
Habitats in the Wound, From Quagmire (vhf 2005)
"From the opening track 'Ingrate', significant divergences from the aesthetic of previous releases are manifest. The band's previous paradigm involved wells of silence, barely more than room sound, from which bursts of sound would erupt like icy stalagmites. Psychic wounds reflected in puncture wounds inflicted by sound; striking but cold. On 'Ingrate' the song breathes with subtle and continuous sentience, underpinned by Espvall-Santoleri's cello drones and the eventual transition to calm but probing acoustic guitar and vocals. It's a lot more flowing and organic than previous work. The title track is splendid, and has some of Dorothy's most forceful and easily absorbed vocals, though it ends with eyes downcast as electric guitar and cello hang on to each other for grim death while they spiral downwards into the void. 'Holiday Song' is decidedly not, unless you're at one of those fascist English holiday camps contemplating an early check out. Great multi-tracked ghost girl vocals steer it into Gothic territory, in a good way. Sharron Kraus's whistle plays off-key to the primary melody on 'Between the Chores' with alarming results. There are clearly no easy options on this record, as the track ends like a hasty execution. If the record can be encapsulated in one track, it would be 'A Father's Vision/Story of Knife', where the elements of FQ's sound come together for a subtle and chilling walk through Geller's dark imaginings. Everything, including Simon Wickham-Smith's electronics ares so barely there but still somehow so clearly etched that you wonder how they manage to prevent it all from falling apart... 'Habitats in the Wound' is audible in the same way that darkness is visible..." Tony Dale, Terrascope
To order: VHF
Caught in Unknowing, From Quagmire (vhf 2002)
"Unsettling. Maudlin. Uncertain. Spacious. Unexpected. The tangy hum of Dorothy Geller's nylon-stringed guitar anchors this achingly sparse album, leaving plenty of room for violinist James Wolf's subtle noodlings and harrowing explorations alike. This sounds like explorational avant-chamber music from some deep, dark forest, one where the players frequently stop playing to better hear the insects scraping their legs nearby... " Tiffany Lee Brown, Venus Zine
To order: VHF
Tropic of Barren, From Quagmire (vhf 2001)
"The Tropic of Barren [presents] slowly unfolding songs that are full of mystery and suspense. "Suite of Windmill and Sycamore" open things with raw and bluesy guitar work played as if every note would be the last one ever played. In the distance a drone starts building up and unorthodox percussion jumps in and out of the speakers.... Dorothy Geller [known, along with From Quagmire violinist James Wolf, for work with chamber rock ensemble Laconic Chamber] plays the nylon string guitar throughout the whole record and it's truly spectacular in the sadly flowing "Suite of Atoms and Media." This drifts right into the aptly titled "Fragment of Watching," which veers off into a slightly more experimental neighborhood, but the nylon guitar just keeps on floating in profoundly sad sound structures as if nothing would have happened. On all six of The Tropic of Barren's tracks, there's space for every tone to breathe and every instrument to speak, resulting in a detailed sonic conversation that'll keep you going well into the endless night." Mats Gustafsson, Broken Face
To order: VHF
A History of Epidemics, Laconic Chamber (Camera Obscura 2000)
"With arrangements that seem one part God Speed You Black Emperor and one part This Mortal Coil, and that evoke a rich lyricism and aesthetic reminiscent of Nick Cave, Laconic Chamber's "History" is simply like nothing I've heard. The album realizes an incredibly rich tension between singular moments of somber beauty and chilling eruptions. The spaces in between are occupied by the baroque wanderings of D. Geller's whispered vocals and J. Wolf's melancholic violin, both of which move through and along with hypnotic, often march-like rhythms. The album is deeply intimate without seeming claustrophobic. Like moving through a foggy forest, you experience an unsettling closeness that you know conceals an expanse, and never know what awaits you around the next curve. This album gets deeper and deeper under my skin with each listen, and find the visions and emotions it evokes to be endless. With groups like GSYBE!, Sigur Ros, and Boards of Canada now garnering worldwide attention, the time's probably ripening for a wider audience to appreciate this brilliant and haunting album." Amazon
To order: Camera Obscura
La Reproduction Interdite d'une Peinture de Crise (Kids Eat Free 1999)
"A dark, spartan work of sonic disintegrations and accumulations. At times, very much akin to Village of Savoonga or Godspeed. Metallic abrasions, clouds of hiss and static, field recordings (of birds and airplanes), and short purring loops surface, mingle and dissipate. The two lengthy tracks are punctuated by the occasional appearance of frail A haunting and lovely 24 minutes from the duo of Dorothy Geller and Douglas Wolf, recorded in 1999."
To order: Aquarius Records
A complete Stranger, Elegy Ca. 1923 (Apollo Records 1999)
Some 7" vinyl copies left. This is a band I played in between 1996 and 2000 with bassist Bernie Wandel and bassist/clarinet player Eric Bruns. Being insane at the time, the music that got released on this was pretty good but actually less great than some other parts of the quantity of recordings we created together. The sleeves are quality reproductions of Eric's breathtaking photographs.
For orders, send me a message.
I am a woman and I am a musician, and I am something distinctly separate, that is neither of those, but something combinatory of those two and many other aspects. I am not a ‘womyn born womyn’ except in the imaginings brought by a set of purely social acts that are sometimes amidst the multiple nows becoming a body.
Nor am I a musician who sings for the ‘soul’ or some unspeakable emotion. I noise, in my quiet way, to speak the twisted and skewed, fully utterable at the moment we dare to say what has been feared or forbidden.
As this neither woman nor musician, or both at once, I find my better self against fixity and commodity, loathing the marketing of the intimacy of personal space, a demand for the performer’s sexuality or personality, the gaze that coats living, changing, morphing tissue and fluid with the suffocating synthetics of expectation, projection, and other desires that form the violent refuse disowned by the normal world. (Trauma is not for oggling.)
I cannot just yet call music “work.” For “work” in the corporate US is only ever mechanical reproduction. Only productivity is rewarded: (how many “records have you sold?”) When I view music as work, in this everywhere definition, it loses its intimacy, and becomes something empty and exhausting.
Nor can I easily call music “property.” For property involves nervously guarding, and desiring isolation. I have never dreamed of a cash cow or a Mercedes. I do not wish to join the propertied class, so that someday I turn and look upon a bandmate as a “marketable” bringer of ‘cool’ or ‘cred.’
Yet it is not adequate for music to be free of charge, or to self-sacrifice in the process.
Why should this worker-of-a-different-kind barely live? In this era, the life-sacrifice of a cultural worker can only endorse the very structure of exploitation and de-humanization pushed into, forward, around and within the de-humanizing world of multinational capital. The capitalist accumulators have to starve musicians, writers and thinkers to survive, because if they did not, the entire fabric of culture would be different, less tolerant of US security and less afraid. To allow ourselves to be starved willingly, bolstered by the fantasy of the ‘starving artist,’ is to collude with the plans of the agents of exploitation who right now stalk the globe with tanks and missiles.
The anti-war demonstrators have broken a silence that has postured as US patriotism since September 11th. There are many silences to be broken. Silence breakers in the realm of the word, and in the structures of sound, are being starved, censored, and humiliated daily. Funding is steadily being cut off, intellectual projects are being gutted, major labels increasingly circulate more cheap-to-produce stock repetitions, recycled from backlogs of unpaid artist recordings, loading these de-skilling trances into the places most of us must traverse to eat, socialize and live.
The brutal mass murder taking place in the invasion of Iraq, strategic assassinations, reliance on unpaid domestic labour, the inability to provide the basic necessities of life (healthcare, adequate incomes and housing for all people) and the de-humanizing gestures of those who offer sexual desire, or approval, in return for free music, all these things are direct descendants of a multinational capitalist regime which does not hesitate to manipulate nationalism and national identity for its agenda. The very structures of this regime demand maximum labour while returning minimum, if any, subsistence to its subjects. In many cases it prefers to exterminate those whose labours it is not in a position to benefit from. Though I describe here diverse and unequal forms of violence, varying in intensity, these acts, events, instances are related. Mass death and destruction in Iraq is symptomatic of a regime that values neither life nor labour.
Now is the time to recognize the connection between dissatisfactions, revoltions, and violence, it is not the time to diminish or dismiss any of them.
What will characterize the ’freedom’ or the ’not-war’ beckoned, if the violence and repression that drench those other practices, and form these very concepts, is ignored?
Hope that your summer starts nicely Knowing that you like our music I thought I'd let you know that we have uploaded 4 new songs in our player, feel free to come listen... They are from our second CD which is now released and should be available in fine record stores close to you
Hi Dora Bleu! *****You have a very sweet voice***** Many beautiful days and I'm sure I will see you around town! Thank you for the intro to your lovely world. xoxoJordi
