IGNATZ & DE STERVENDE HONDEN - You Can't See Me

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)

"In Tandem" is a new project which deconstructs this first piece which contains 10 piano files and two synth sound files. The project uses simple intervals which creates landscapes with a focus on resolve. C Major key signature was used and reminds me of the work of Steve Reich. It is fun deconstructing the original track and the rest of the pieces are coming together quite nicely. 

The first piece is busy, with many small melody lines, it means there are many sounds the listener can isolate to practice their deep listening and analytical skills. Enjoy the music.

In Tandem I

ulla - table

Music composed for 'Descaler', a dance performance choreographed by Rafael Reynoso in collaboration with Nicholas Grubbs during his September 2017 residency at Otion Front Studio

Descaler I, II, & III

From the 2011 album "Sentimental Favourites" – originally released on Dekorder. Available digitally on Bandcamp at the nice price of pay what you want.
https://andrewpekler.bandcamp.com/album/sentimental-favourites

Sentimental Favourites

Name your price

The Twilight Of Your Smile

The Sacrificial Code

Kali Malone - Litanic Cloth Wrung (from "The Sacrificial Code" iDEAL 2xLP/3xCD)

Accident du Travail. We fell in love with their album on Trilogy Tapes and after a coincidental (or not) meeting in Brussels, our 29th release and first ever live album slowly took shape. Recorded in the mythical London Cafe OTO in 2016, the outfit of Julie Normal and Olivier Demeaux explores a beautiful path of arrhythmic music, subaquatic sounds and celestial zones.

[vlek29] - Accident du Travail - live at Cafe OTO
Julie Normal_ondes Martenot + Olivier Demeaux_harmonium & machines.
Cafe OTO, Londres, 2016
enregistrement. Adam Matschulat 
mastering. Fred Alstadt 
artwork. Takahiro Kurashima
remerciements. Will Bankhead , Abby Thomas , Jean-Charles , Hugo Sanchez,  Hiro Abe
distribution. Crevette

Out September 27th.
Pre-order: https://vlekrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vlek29-accident-du-travail-live-at-cafe-oto

Accident du Travail - Ouverture All'Inglese (taken from the upcoming [vlek29]: live at Cafe OTO)

FUJI||||||||||TA, iki, LP

Release date - April 3th 2020
Catalogue nr. - HG2003
Format - Ltd. Vinyl/digital

https://hallowground.bandcamp.com

Credits:
All music composed, played and Recorded by FUJI|||||||||||TA
Mixed by Makoto Oshiro
Mastering by Lawrence English at Negative Space

Tracklist:
1) keshiki (09:42)
2) nNami (09:20)
3) osoi (10:12)
4) sukima (07:03)

///
"FUJI|||||||||||TA has created a work that operates as a beautiful nexus between the material and immaterial qualities of music. 
It is a lived-in dreamscape of deep, rich tonality. A remarkable debut."
(Lawrence English)

///
FUJI||||||||||TA, real name FUJITA Yosuke, is a Japanese sound artist. After countless performances in different contexts either solo or along artists such as Yamantaka Eye of Boredoms and the legendary avant-gardist SUZUKI Akio as well as a slew of solo releases, his LP »iki« (»breath«) for the Swiss-based Hallow Ground label is his first in nine years. On these four pieces, Fujita explores the idiosyncratic sound qualities of the pipe organ he has built all by himself in 2009. This - quite literally unique - instrument features only eleven pipes, an air pump called »fuigo« which was modelled after a traditional blacksmith’s one and has no keyboard. Inspired by traditional gagaku, it was designed to evoke rich landscapes rather function as just another musical instrument. While his previous records saw FUJI||||||||||TA explore various modes of abstraction, »iki« is a highly emotive yet meditative album, musically restrained but full of imagination.

»keshiki« immediately sets the mood for this record with a long sustained note that is punctuated by the soft clicking of Fujita’s air pump. Once Fujita carefully starts bringing melodies into play, the interplay of the drone and the discrete rhythmic element gives way to a fuller harmonic whole. »keshiki« is an intimate piece that perfectly displays the artist’s knack for painting a rich sonic picture with only a reduced palette. »nNami« juxtaposes the sounds of two pipes that are out of tune with each other, creating a hypnotic sensation of ebb and flow (»nami« translates to »wave«) that is full of subtle friction. It’s a staggering artistic interpretation of the instrument’s material characteristics. Clocking in at ten minutes, »osoi« (»slow«) is an overall melancholic piece that explores the relationship between different tone colours through minute changes in pace. Finally, »sukima« (»blank space«) is the shortest and the most rhythmic piece of the four. Composed of only staccati, it is a masterful exploration of the harmonic qualities Fujita’s stunning pipe organ has to offer.

Recorded between September and December of 2019, »iki« marks the culmination of FUJI||||||||||TA’s ten-year-long work with the instrument that he had built without any prior knowledge and started to teach himself to play without a manual in sight. It is, in other words, the unique result of a unique musical mind paying his dues to the uniqueness of his own creation; introspective and welcoming at once.

FUJI||||||||||TA - osoi (HG2003)

P.L.U.R.

Time Swim

Félicia Atkinson
Everything Evaporate
SP121
Shelter Press

Out April 3rd, 2020

—

Everything Evaporate

There is that instance, when you are passing over a threshold, where the before and after fall away and it is only the threshold itself that you are existing within - that neutral space of the in-between, of the transition, that becomes the actual lived-in moment. It is through fully occupying and being present in that transitional space that we are able to access new perspectives that allow for a reassessment of things previously thought understood. The five tracks that make up Everything Evaporate feel like a sustained moment of focus during a period of transition; a longer breath taken in that actual lived-in moment.

You find in the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, when two colors meet, a bleed that washes out the boarder; a porousness that feels like a fleeting but significant transitory event. The idea of a “crossing” comes to mind - the willingness to extend oneself from one place out towards another. For Atkinson this willingness manifests through language and through the inventing of new stories as a method of reaching across and creating the possibilities for connection.

Spectral drones, gongs, bells, pianos and marimbas accompany Atkinson’s voice, but now we also find laconic pitch-shifted conversationalists and digitally harmonized chanteuses joining in. As mesmerizing as the narrators voice is at the center of these tracks, it is the addition of other voices that produces the heteroglossic complexities. These are the voices that most often morph into pure sonic materiality; they exist just under the surface of the music creating texture and rhythm while occasionally pushing their way into the foreground with abstracted extrapolations. And it is through the summing of these many voices that a fractal image emerges, at once both singular and plural.

Everything Evaporate was produced after a year of travel and shows. It is, in a sense, a reassessed document of public performance with improvised studio interventions acting to break the linear stream of the live-on-stage temporality. There is a resonance between these in-studio improvisations of Atkinson’s and Frankenthaler’s paint pores: Before executing the performative action materials are considers, processes are devised and then, with fluid gesture, the event happens. In Everything Evaporate it is through a trust in materials, process and gesture that new melodies and language become available and new narratives pool and find form.

There are many moments within these piece that hint at the sensation of falling asleep while reading a novel - the stories, images and characters follow you into your unconscious but also wait for you on the page; you walk a liminal edge and wander that threshold of consciousness where the book and your imagination become intertwined. As this threshold is crossed your understanding of what has been given to you and what you have created for yourself is obscured, a new space opens up and new stories are revealed.

- words by Ben Vida.

Everything Evaporate

Félicia Atkinson 'Everything Evaporate' (SP121)

booking: contact@pr-t-n.org
mgmt: wannes.cuypers1@gmail.com
inquiries: connect@sofiebirch.dk

Time Swim

Sofie Birch

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