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, Alexei Borisov 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
Releases:
Clones of Eros; Draft Recordings cdr, Dora Bleu (Givin'it Records 2008)
Solo home recordings for studio sessions plus one track with cellist Helena Espvall.
To order: Givin'it
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...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..." 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.
Forthcoming interview and Lithuanian translation by Gabriele Labanauskaite. This is a fragment. The full interview will be available shortly.
GL: Where does the inspiration comes from?
DB:...The world is increasingly full of music-makers and creators. I sometimes see this as an unconscious attempt to re-take cultural reality on a mass scale and make it something that has personal meaning and is smaller and truer to the experiences of people than the concept of the world belched out by corporations.
But when I am confronted with an excess of feeling, a complete overwhelm, which happens often, performing and composing are ways of dealing with it, ways of being in it. Personal crisis feels collective for me. I think about how personal experiences, lost love or other kinds of grief for instance, take their shape from social experience. I believe that the social experience of personal life is the same context that has also permitted dark prisons and black sites, the tearing apart of communities, spying, negligence of human need (housing, health, food and so on.) The kinds of casual violence that people wreak on each other is not separate from what the corporate state causes us to constantly experience because we have so few other reference points or because those points of reference are difficult to remember or access or create. When I'm trying to understand my own unmanageable moods and feelings, my experience of precariousness in the world, I can't help but understand them in a collective sense, and in terms of socialized and institutionalized punishment and torture and suffering. Capitalism has always made people disposable, but more recently institutional reality, particularly in the United States (but not only there), has also begun a widespread process that I would call Abu Graihbization. An entire context, the suffering or ignoring of war or the military state, privation on mass scales and in places where it goes unrecognized, as well as the disposability of people and other effects of capitalism, all contribute to a state of reality, emotional dispositions, the way people become used to seeing and understanding each other. These casual things that we do to each other are not natural but socialized. The corporate state might be committing violence for reasons of power and money, but the social fabric this creates makes it difficult to imagine that other people are not objects of possession, association or disassociation. It's not that my suffering is similar or comparable to others, but that there is a possibility of solidarity in it that I accept, though definitely NOT because it makes me feel "better." In fact, it contributes to the overwhelm. These kinds of intersections are what come out of me when I play. It might not be quite right to call this inspiration because it's not divine and it's not a muse, but it does describe something about the inner life that ends up writing or performing...
(February 2009)
..Myspace Layout Generator-Layoutgen.com ..
Hello Dora, how are you? Hope you had nice shows in Moscow, St.Petersburg and Baltic countries! It was great to meet you in Kaliningrad (hope you are not shaking reading this, he-he ;) But, seriously, sorry for what was wrong... Love your CD's, thanks for your music and your voice, thank you for that show.. Take care, greetings from Tanja and Vladimir, Alex
TRICK OR TREAT
ENJOY & HAVE A FUN WEEKEND
