Extract from 'Image Langage' (SP140)
Out June, 24th 2022 on 2xLPs, CD, digital download.

Order: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/album/image-langage

—
Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast.

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. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” 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.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. 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.

Image Language is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity.

— Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Image Language

Becoming a stone

FELICIA ATKINSON 'Becoming a Stone' (SP140)

Multicolor

We are happy to present two pieces of ambient music, and two artists already seen on our page.

two songs to transport us to all sides of the mountain, day and night, to feel in the place we like.

Artists:
Inner / Yenaldooshi

NAIND AR-31 A2 Yeenaldooshi - Spiritsgrief

SUGAI KEN is an electronic musician based in Kanagawa, Japan.
He combines synthesis with recordings of his daily surroundings to conjure the subtle and profound ambience of the Japanese nightscape.

 鯰上 - On The Quakefish is an immersive exploration displaying a rugged invention, compressed into short bursts of electrifying genius.

LFI001 will be released on vinyl as a limited edition on January 27th 2016

Album credits-
All tracks written and produced by SUGAI KEN
SUGAI KEN is performed by Ken Sugai
Mastered by Neel at EnnisLab Studio in Rome 
Translation assisted by Mariko Arimura
Cover artwork by Fred Fowler, design by Steele Bonus 



SUGAI KEN - 鯰上 -On The Quakefish -LFI001 (preview)

From album 'TRACED', Pattern 04, Sonic Pieces, 2017

Traced

Post Human

Artwork: Diogo Pinto and Marta Gaspar
Master: Hugo Santos
Recording Engineers: 
Bernardo Barata and Burnt Friedman

PH003 - Mohammad Reza Mortazavi 'Focus' A1 Going

Lucrecia Dalt - Atmospheres Touch

Learn more: https://smarturl.it/rvngnl47

Taken from Anticlines.

©2018 RVNG Intl. / igetrvng.com

Anticlines (RVNGNL47 - 320 MP3)

Atmospheres Touch

Lucrecia Dalt - Atmospheres Touch

This is Surroundings.

For our new series with Shure we follow three artists as they create new music from the sounds of their cities. Featuring Flava D in London, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith in Los Angeles and Honey Dijon in Berlin.

We travel to Los Angeles to meet experimental synth composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. We followed Kaitlyn on a trail through Millard Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains. Capturing the sounds of footsteps, birdsongs, rustling branches and much more, Kaitlyn then returned to her home studio and ran the recordings through synthesisers creating new shapes and tones. The end result is a blissful ambient track built entirely from sounds recorded on the hike with nothing else added.. Watch the full process here: crackm.ag/2w2TDCT

Kaitlyn recorded her surroundings using a Shure MV88 iOS mic which you can find out more about here: crackm.ag/2uznSk4

SURROUNDINGS002: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Sunset Ridge

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie
from the album "Quellgeister#3-Bussd" expected October 2019.

Composed, performed and produced by Stefan Fraunberger. 
Recorded in September 2016 except B3 and B4 in September 2018 in the fortified church of Bussd. Bellows pumped / interpreted by Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger except on track B3 and B4 by Nicolai Guta.
Mastered by Neel at Enisslab Studio, Rome
Cover Artwork by George Sowden - Designed by M-L-XL
Supported by SKE / Austro Mechana

doser034LP - Morphine Records 2019
All rights reserved to the respective owners.

Stefan Fraunberger's Quellgeister#3 Bussd is Recorded entirely on an abandoned church's organ in the village of Bussd, Romania, the album is the third installment of the series by Austrian artist and composer Stefan Fraunberger. His research on the influence of nature on culture touches on time, periphery, memory, and transience as evidenced in his Quellgeister research. The album is an archeological sonic research on the deteriorating Organ discovered in the saxon church in Transylvania.

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie (doser034LP preview)

Released on Longforms Editions March 2019
The title Stereo'frogi'ic is a play on the word stereophonic – to play with the illusion of multi-directional audible perspective – in this case presenting a quasi-bioacoustic sound piece, crafted from found recordings of frogs, insects, a recording of an animal scattering in the bushes and other 'vocal' animals wavering about in a stereo field. This piece was recorded and edited in the summer of 2019.

I have used slightly modified animals sounds to create aural illusions, morphing the perception of animal and machine generated sounds or raw recordings and digitally effected sounds. I wanted to create a tempo that would mimic something similar to the meditative sense you can experience from the flow or sound of the wind and other elements, when you are sitting in an open field while recording.

Stereo'frog'ic (Longforms Editions 2019)

From the split release with Hideki Umezawa "Two Views of Amami Ōshima". 
Full length album: https://andrewpekler.bandcamp.com/album/two-views-of-amami-shima
Limited edition LP via Edições CN: https://edicoescn.bandcamp.com/album/two-views-of-amami-oshima

Amami Remote Extension (Excerpt)

Andrew Pekler

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