L(i)quid Listening: Will Guthrie & James Rushford, Delphine Dora (France)

Liquid Architecture is ecstatic to present Will Guthrie & James Rushford in duo, with a solo performance from Delphine Dora at the Carlton Church of All Nations. The program traverses experimentalism with a vast range of roots; free jazz, musique concrete, medieval instrumentation, organ music, and cracked electronics to name the immediate. 

Delphine Dora is a French pianist, organist, vocalist, improviser, and composer, born in Paris in 1980. For nearly two decades, she has cultivated a distinctive and intuitive musical language that bridges improvisation, folk, contemporary classical, experimental and electroacoustic music, as well as poetic expression. Situated at the confluence of composition and improvisation, her work unfolds through a singular and highly accomplished practice of instant composition, where form emerges in the immediacy of performance. Deeply anchored in the present moment, it explores altered temporalities and sensitive geographies, weaving resonant connections between the contemporary and the archaic, the poetic and the ineffable, the physicality of sound and the ethereal, the outer world and inner life. Her creative process embraces openness, chance, and collaboration. Dora’s prolific solo and collaborative output—released on labels such as Recital, Modern Love, Morc, Okraïna, Feeding Tube, and three:four—encompasses pipe organ explorations, genre-blurring song forms, piano compositions, and site-specific improvisations. She has performed extensively across France, Europe, Japan, and Georgia, in venues ranging from underground experimental spaces to more institutional settings — including theaters, museums, art centers, renowned festivals — as well as historic churches.

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, and leads the contemporary hybrid percussion / gamelan group ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH. His music has been released on labels such as Black Truffle, Editions Mego, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, Gaffer Records, Hasana Editions, 23five, iDEAL and his own label Antboy Music.

Guthrie first made a name for himself within the Australian jazz scene, establishing himself at a young age as a major presence by winning the Wangaratta National Jazz Awards for drums in 1997 and going on to perform with many of Australia’s most celebrated jazz musicians such as Mark Simmonds, Julien Wilson and Ren Walters. In the new millennium, his work took a long detour away from the drum kit through junk electronics, extreme amplification and electro-acoustic techniques, documented on a series of solo and collaborative recordings from these years.

James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer, whose work draws from concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been described as ‘electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart’ (Boomkat) and ‘haunted Jacobean ASMR’ (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to new age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm and timbre. 

In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorisation of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (See the Welter, for solo piano, 2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, 2020). Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the 20th century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.