About 15 minutes into this week’s TANK mix, a low drone appears, as if emanating from the core of the earth. Two male voices appear, one musing on the Buddhist disciple Milarepa, the other in what sounds like a religious chant, as the rumble beneath them swells and shifts. Although the piece in question is by Éliane Radigue, it neatly mirrors the artistry of Atkinson, whose output straddles ambient and ASMR without ever fully aligning with either format. The artist, who also runs Shelter Press, creates soundscapes of disquieting intimacy and pure timbre. Naturalistic textures - rain, birdsong, low whispers - conjure an ambiguous sense of space, suggesting the depths and mysteries of the world we inhabit. When TANK asked her about what inspired this mix, she shared the following Frank O'Hara poem:

TODAY by Frank O'Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.

[1950]

Tracklist:
Marisa Anderson Tara Jane O Neil : You’d be so nice to come home to
BBC archive of a waterfall
Claire Rousey & Patrick Shiroshi: silent moon
Eliane Radigue: Songs of Milarepa / Elimination of desires
Morton Feldman: Last pieces
Luc Ferrari: Presque Rien avec filles
Harold Budd: L’Enfant Perdu
Félicia Atkinson: If there is no Where ( Music piece for the Riga Biennale)
Kassel Jaeger: Shifted in dreams

photo credit: Eleonore Huisse

TANK Mix: Félicia Atkinson, "harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all"

Road snakes

“Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents,
through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?”

― John Ashbery

Φ
https://soundcloud.com/fefeatkinson
https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/felicia_atkinson/

SI088 - FELICIA ATKINSON

03.Arbol

02.Abecedario

01.Ancho Mar : Seda

Clara de Asís - guitar, electronics
Cyril Meysson - low frequency generators, oscillators, electronics

Recorded in Lyon, FR, Nov. 2016.

L'idée des choses / Clara de Asís & Cyril Meysson

Preview del track incluido en la edición de aniversario de TICA, proyecto de Chrs Galarreta y Fabiola Vasquez, proyecto referente de la música experimental en Lima. Esta versión es también un homenaje a Makuko Gallardo. Cantante del grupo musical de cumbia Armonía 10.

Armonia - Versión de un Corazón Sufrido

Performance
Saturday, March 31st, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, March 31st, ISSUE presents Parisian-born artist Félicia Atkinson presenting a brand new performance involving an imaginary dialogue between the poems of Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and texts of her own, in French and in English, accompanied by electronics, voice and piano. The evening also features Afrikan Sciences & Sassacyprigo presenting a performance of nuanced soundscapes, mindful movements, and rhythms that conjure different temporalities.

Atkinson’s distinct practice incorporates diffuse poetic atmospheres and pointillistically rendered sounds that constantly suspend and re-introduce themselves. Often moving to emphasize the relationship between music and sculpture -- sound and its spatialization -- Atkinson’s work concentrates upon the implicit narrative of a “poetics of things” happening in sound. Here, like in the poems of Ponge, a profound “readymade” empathy toward objects, technology, and music emerges. Atkinson is also co-director for the label Shelter Press alongside Bartolomé Sanson, which has released works from Ben Vida, Gábor Lázár, Tomoko Sauvage, D/P/I, Stephen O’Malley, and others.

"La nuit parfois ravive une plante singulière dont la lueur décompose les chambres meublées en massifs d'ombres." The night sometimes revives a singular plant whose glow breaks down the room furnished in masses of shadows" -- Francis Ponge, The Candle (La Bougie) in Le Parti Pris des Choses / The Nature of Things, 1942

Emerging from a long lineage of musical structures born from the difficult social and political conditions of race relations, Afrikan Sciences uses electronic instruments as a medium for open-ended explorations of form and composition across the musical linguistic heritage of African-American music, while Sassacyprigo’s free-form dance stylings channel intuitive action and a continuous “soul survivalist” strength to live free.

“As a human being, I find that I’m at constant battle between the imposed power structure’s ways of looking at freedom and actually living free,” Sassacyprigo states. “It is within my search for personal voice and belonging that I create.”

This program is curated by writer and media theorist DeForrest Brown Jr. Concerned with speculative futures in performative contexts, Brown is part of the cataloguing space Elevator to Mezzanine and was ISSUE's 2017 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow.

Recorded by Bob Bellerue / Mixed by James Emrick

Félicia Atkinson - LIVE at ISSUE / March 31st, 2018

Extrait du disque "Hinterland" de Cyril Meysson, à paraître en Février 2020 avec Soleils Bleus.

SB019 • Cyril Meysson • Hinterland (Extrait)

I LIKE DOGS / khalid el morabethi

This track entitled "None of the Two Things" is by visual artist, experimental musician, and poet Félicia Atkinson. Félicia’s work deals with topics of deep listening, cut ups, silence, noise, and language and is a combination of improvisation and superimposed composition, as an abstract woven material, where the voice meets electronics, acoustic instruments, and electric distortions.

Rant #3: Félicia Atkinson

My name is Khalid EL Morabethi. I make sounds and stuff, :)

I LIKE DOGS / khalid el morabethi

secicrexe