Conatus is a duo composed by Delphine Dora and Žils Deless-Vēliņš (Lunt)

Both have been knowing each other for a long time, and were involved in musical activities. Conatus is a reference to Spinoza philosophy. Our music tries to create a dynamic of growth and becoming (Heraclite, Deleuze) with a strong dialectic process. Atmospheric layers of raw sounds and Deles ‘drones, and drums, match with Dora’s post-jazz piano lines, and minimalistic contemporary classical patterns.

Closest musical reference could be Gastr Del Sol, or some SYR albums. Result is this idiosyncratic mix of experiments and meditative atmospheres, where melancholic silent spaces cross with wild mineral sounds.

Delphine Dora is a french musician, composer and improviser from France with a diverse output and a prolific discography. Her music is based mostly around piano and voice but can also be enriched with keyboard, computer, field recordings and a wide range of other instrumentations (synth, percussion, electronics, trombone etc.) and has tended in her recent release « l’inattingible » to blur the line between songwriting mode and experimental explorations.
Inspired by different musical aesthetics, her personal world into sound, is based on an idea of composition as a spontaneous process, nourished by a variety of approaches: songs based on poetry and texts by the likes of Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Kathleen Raine ; raw sketches melted into lost languages; free improvisations performed for piano and for various instruments; wild vocal experimentation explored, electro-acoustic music, etc. Her work which deal between music, sound and langage (real or invented) combine intimacy with mystical, ecstatic and dark unsettling atmospheres.
Her recent research and new focus deal with poetic and environment of sound / landscape, the physicality and materiality of sound, the boundaries between concrete sounds and abstraction / between domestic sounds and the sacred.

Žils Deless-Vēliņš has a mystical relationship to sound and music since he was a child and his crafting of music can be compared to a construction kit game, where music as a whole is more than the sum of sounds. For him, sound has some sort of kinship with the concept of pneuma in Stoician philosophy. Sound expects to be found to become music, lying there in an intuitive background. He worked on a wide range of experimental projects, as a songwriter, sound engineer, and co-founder of French-based label We Are Unique! Records.
Deless tries to consider music as a thinking process among many others like philosophy, or psychoanalysis (a lot of Empty Spaces sounds have been recorded between sessions with his patients). More recently he started to work on video making and did Vjing for the band he has been working with. Deless did not choose a specific path in music and sound : his identity can be puzzling has he didn’t write music only in “experimental” style. His musical approach can be compared to Jim O’rourke in a sense, according to the variety of style they both try to embrace. The most extreme feedback potentially contain poetry or meaning. Gilles can feel sometimes like a “musician without quality” as Ulrich in Musil’s novel.
He is now based in Latvia where music is a ground for everyday life, and essential to Latvian identity.