For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don't speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character's tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist. Atkinson lives on the wild coast of Normany and has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. She has collaborated with musicians including Jefre Cantu Ledesma, Chris Watson, Christina Vantzou, and Stephen O'Malley, and with ensembles including Eklekto (Geneva) and Neon (Oslo). She has performed at venues and festivals including INA GRM/Maison de la Radio and the Philharmonie (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), the Barbican Center (London), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Atonal (Berlin), Henie Onstad (Oslo), Unsound (Krakow), and Skanu Mesz (Riga). Her work has been commissioned by filmmakers (Ben Rivers, Chivas de Vinck) and fashion houses (Prada, Burberry). She has exhibited in museums, galleries, and biennials including RIBOCA Biennale (Riga), Overgaden (Copenhagen), BOZAR (Brussels), Espace Paul Ricard (Paris), and MUCA ROMA (Mexico City).
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2LP
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SHELTER 140LP
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LP version. "Felicia Atkinson's music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record -- Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy -- the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens -- or is it offers, kindly, even promises? -- to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O'Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson's acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in 'The Lake is Speaking,' a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos . . . At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On 'Pieces of Sylvia,' a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson's work -- not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else's film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls 'a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn't exist.' . . . Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson's capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings -- not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments..." --Thea Ballard (2022)
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SHELTER 140CD
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"Felicia Atkinson's music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record -- Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy -- the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens -- or is it offers, kindly, even promises? -- to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O'Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson's acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in 'The Lake is Speaking,' a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos . . . At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On 'Pieces of Sylvia,' a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson's work -- not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else's film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls 'a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn't exist.' . . . Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson's capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings -- not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments..." --Thea Ballard (2022)
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SHELTER 110LP
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Double LP version. Printed artwork on inner and outer reverse-board jackets. French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.
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SHELTER 110CD
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French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.
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SHELTER 081LP
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Last copies of now deleted edition... Double LP version. Félicia Atkinson's new full-length album, Hand In Hand follows the highly-acclaimed A Readymade Ceremony (SHELTER 055CD/LP, 2015), and her collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Comme Un Seul Narcisse (SHELTER 070LP, 2016). Composed over 2016 at EMS and at home in Brittany, Hand In Hand could be considered as the most ambitious body of work recorded by the French musician and artist. Strident modular sounds tear apart minimal beats and drones; Fictional stories told by a voice slowly become reality. Hand In Hand is meant to be a moment of common thinking and listening, in its diversity and abstraction. In the same way a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick or a sculpture by Guy Mees can be perceived: trivial, sensitive, and mysterious at the same time. "I'm Following You" is a bleached romantic ballad for Fender Rhodes that could be the ending title of a martian love story, whereas "Visnaga" praises the resources of a desert plant through asmr voices, field recordings, and evasive chords. "A House A Dance A Poem" is a feminist hymn composed as a pyramidal structure, referring, at the same time, to the A-frame houses, the yoga position of the triangle, the first letter of the Roman alphabet, and the feminine sex. In the closing song, "No Fear But Anticipation", Atkinson offers an open-hearted plea about the existentialist necessity of finding desire even when the times seem too dark to think about it. A telepathic and non-scholastic anthem for Don Delillo, Joan Didion, and Jean Paul Sartre. The final Buchla sounds that close the record seem to deliver an unspeakable message that only birds and aliens could transcript. The echo of the '80s sci-fi anxious aethetics resonates with today's transparency of digital sounds in the whole record. The cohabitation of simple midi textures and historical Serge and Buchla signals are convoked and confronted together by a voice. The human instrument appears here as the epicenter of the recordings, giving the other instruments a gravitational point. Joan La Barbara, Robert Ashley, or Delia Derbyshire are the main influences of Atkinson in their own way of inviting fiction and abstraction as the essential materials of composition. For Hand In Hand, Félicia Atkinson used different sources for the lyrics and scores of her tracks: house plant instruction books, old issues of Desert Magazine, architecture manuals, JG Ballard and K. Dick's books, as well as her own poetry.
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SHELTER 081CD
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Félicia Atkinson's new full-length album, Hand In Hand follows the highly-acclaimed A Readymade Ceremony (SHELTER 055CD/LP, 2015), and her collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Comme Un Seul Narcisse (SHELTER 070LP, 2016). Composed over 2016 at EMS and at home in Brittany, Hand In Hand could be considered as the most ambitious body of work recorded by the French musician and artist. Strident modular sounds tear apart minimal beats and drones; Fictional stories told by a voice slowly become reality. Hand In Hand is meant to be a moment of common thinking and listening, in its diversity and abstraction. In the same way a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick or a sculpture by Guy Mees can be perceived: trivial, sensitive, and mysterious at the same time. "I'm Following You" is a bleached romantic ballad for Fender Rhodes that could be the ending title of a martian love story, whereas "Visnaga" praises the resources of a desert plant through asmr voices, field recordings, and evasive chords. "A House A Dance A Poem" is a feminist hymn composed as a pyramidal structure, referring, at the same time, to the A-frame houses, the yoga position of the triangle, the first letter of the Roman alphabet, and the feminine sex. In the closing song, "No Fear But Anticipation", Atkinson offers an open-hearted plea about the existentialist necessity of finding desire even when the times seem too dark to think about it. A telepathic and non-scholastic anthem for Don Delillo, Joan Didion, and Jean Paul Sartre. The final Buchla sounds that close the record seem to deliver an unspeakable message that only birds and aliens could transcript. The echo of the '80s sci-fi anxious aethetics resonates with today's transparency of digital sounds in the whole record. The cohabitation of simple midi textures and historical Serge and Buchla signals are convoked and confronted together by a voice. The human instrument appears here as the epicenter of the recordings, giving the other instruments a gravitational point. Joan La Barbara, Robert Ashley, or Delia Derbyshire are the main influences of Atkinson in their own way of inviting fiction and abstraction as the essential materials of composition. For Hand In Hand, Félicia Atkinson used different sources for the lyrics and scores of her tracks: house plant instruction books, old issues of Desert Magazine, architecture manuals, JG Ballard and K. Dick's books, as well as her own poetry.
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SHELTER 055CD
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Félicia Atkinson (visual artist, writer, musician, graduate of École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris) presents A Readymade Ceremony, a concrète/post-digital oratorio in five parts. In pursuit of a radical economic autonomy, she created A Readymade Ceremony entirely on her laptop using basic software. The album's first foundational element is a text collage of extracts from Atkinson's own 2014 book Improvising Sculpture As Delayed Fictions, French poet René Char's 1955 Recherche de la base et du sommet, and Georges Bataille's 1937 erotic prose piece Madame Edwarda, as well as found texts, mostly from the Italian magazine Mousse. Objects speaking, sculptures arguing: there is a surrealistic feeling in the dark whisperings that one hears responding to Madame Edwarda on "L'Oeil." The other foundational element is Atkinson's return to her early artistic influences, including The Martenot Method; such literary figures as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, and Jean Genet; Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet, Pierre Henry, Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, Fluxus, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman; noise, punk, drone, folk, and electronic music; and the filmmakers Brian de Palma, Nicolas Roeg, and Dario Argento. There's something potentially frightening that happens here, reminiscent of a feeling she felt while listening to Henry's Apocalypse de Jean as a child; something both scary and beautiful; something uncanny, like Ruth White reciting Baudelaire... a readymade ceremony. Notes on each track: "'Against Archives': What can a French woman in her 30s answer to this mostly masculine core of references? 'L'Oeil': What about asking a sweater or an electronic device to speak? 'The book is the territory': It's all about nostalgia; how the shifting of time changes our vision of the past and the future, like an echo or a delay. 'Carve the concept and the artichoke': Is this a waiting room? the prologue of an inexistent play or an introduction for a possible delayed climax? 'Recherche de la base et du sommet': Translates to 'research of the base and the peak,' as a raw reading of René Char. 'There is always a lack in the accident. There is no accident in the expression... the poet is not made of wood. The mouth and the eye speak separately.'" The music can be related to the work of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Valerio Tricoli, Grouper, Geoff Mullen, Sachiko M, and Kassel Jaeger. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering. CD limited to 1000 copies.
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