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)

KASSEL JAEGER 'Shift In Dreams' (SP144)

From the album 'Shift In Dreams', out on Feb. 24, 2023 on Shelter Press
Order: https://kasseljaeger.bandcamp.com/album/shifted-in-dreams

Music composed and performed by François J. Bonnet
Artwork by Eléonore Huisse
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi

Shifted In Dreams

KASSEL JAEGER 'Shifted In Dreams' (SP144)

American avant-electronic musician and essayist Bret Schneider holds no institutional allegiance to one artistic medium. His background encompasses a wide range of work experiences and reveals a man who is connected to the world around him in complex, alienated ways. His thoughts on music and philosophy are intertwined into a billowing exposition. But when exploring the dark recesses of his more aural works, there is an inherent flexibility. Phasing percussive elements and frayed droning lines all lead to a perpetually shifting feeling for an aural uncanny. As fractured as his music can be, there is a dim spark of rumination that threads through his synthetic machinations.

On his latest release, “Xilinx,” Schneider taps into a primordial electronic noise—the kind that rests just on your periphery, unwinding itself to reveal myriad sordid circuits and disjointed projections. These tracks maintain a wired mania, expressing an unsettling undercurrent of ragged repetition and warbling drones. There’s an unexpected elasticity to Schneider’s cabled rhythms, and they often shift across several temporal lines before turning inward, struggling to illuminate an intimate dissonance or imagine a multi-chambered core. Displaying a raw and unusually concise knowledge of how these sounds might fit together, “Xilinx” is part zoetrope, part post-industrial dreamscape. It is an inquiry into the idea of internal movement, a contorted experiment in musical patterning, and an experiment in self-replication.

Xilinx

Bret Schneider - VaVE1

Music inspired by Raaijmakers' electronic music from the 1960s, and his writings on sound composition, particularly "Cahier M: A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound".

TA: Serge Modular feedback & sine/pulse generators, contact microphone.

Two short excerpts from a longer piece.

Please use speakers, not headphones, because of the inner-ear phenomena involved.

Homage to Dick Raaijmakers (excerpt 1)

One-take synth improvisation, taken from 'All In The Same Room'.
Buy tape + digital at nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com/album/020-all-in-the-same-room

All In The Same Room

Grapefruit

Taken from the album 'Microphone Permission' released as LP and digital.

Microphone Permission

Jasmine Guffond 'Forever Listening' (EMEGO 273)

Taken from the album 'Peel' released as 2LP and Digital

Peel

KMRU 'Why Are You Here' (EMEGO 289)

Mads Emil Nielsen + Katja Gretzinger + Nicola Ratti: Framework 3

arbitrary11, release date: 21 August 2020
https://www.arbitraryproject.com/Framework-3

The Danish label/imprint arbitrary announces the release of Framework 3 (arbitrary11) by Mads Emil Nielsen. Framework 3 is the latest instalment in Nielsen’s sequence of graphic scores and recordings. The series includes the Danish composer’s own subjective translations of visual materials and sound pieces accompanied by visual notations.

On this release he collaborates with Katja Gretzinger and Nicola Ratti. Published as a limited edition art print folder, Framework 3 consists of risographed scores and recordings on 10” vinyl and CD – with recordings by Nielsen, along with graphic scores by Gretzinger and contributions by Ratti.

10” + CD + DL
Vinyl side A: Mads Emil Nielsen: 1, 2
Vinyl side B: Mads Emil Nielsen: 3
CD (Disc 2): Nicola Ratti: 1, 2, 3

@madsemilnielsen @nicola-ratti

Mads Emil Nielsen, Nicola Ratti: Framework 3 - excerpts

From the upcoming album "A Visible Length of Light" out on 4/16/21. Available at https://leabertucci.bandcamp.com/

An Arc of the Horizon

off-key cover of I`m so tired* by Fugazi

``out here, I can barely breathe,
surrounded by jealousy and greed.
I can`t be reached, only had one call,
trapped underneath, separate from you all.

this time i lost my return,
in spite of what i learned.
I hid my tracks, spit out all my air,
slipped into cracks, stripped of all my cares.

I`m so tired. sheep are counting me.
no more struggle, no more energy,
no more patient, you can write that down.
it`s all too crazy. I won`t stick around.``

*with slight lyrics adjustments, because of dyslexia, speech impediment and because why not;


**I was too tired to rerecord so just added another layer that was done with both the volca and vocoder set in slightly different pitches, hence it`s extremely off-key, but kinda fun in a way somehow imh0

my nye mantra (recording of a live performance for my cat from my couch)

NORMAN WESTBERG & JACEK MAZURKIEWICZ, First Man in the Moon - LP
Release date - March 12th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2101
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground
Vinyl / digital, catalogue nr. HG2101

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
What Is Good For The Goose (09:35)
That Was Then (08:29)
First Man In The Moon (06:45)
Falsely Accused (06:33)
Oxnard (05:47)

Credits:
Recorded at Studio Diamentowy Pies
Damian Pielka, engineering
Piotr Mazurek, engineering assistance
Jacek Mazurkiewicz, mix
Lawrence English, mastering
John Fell, photographs
Greenpointless, design

///
An unlikely meeting of two like-minded spirits, »First Man in the Moon« sees the former Swans guitarist and Hallow Ground regular Norman Westberg and the prolific double bass player Jacek Mazurkiewicz collaborate for five evocative tracks. The pair finds common ground beyond the boundaries of atmospheric drone, abstract jazz and experimental music and blurs the lines between the acoustic and the electronic. 

The two first met when the composer Mazurkiewicz supported Swans with his solo project 3FoNIA on their 2014 European tour. »I really enjoyed his approach,« says Westberg about the Polish musician’s blending of the acoustic qualities of his instrument with electronically generated sounds. A decision to collaborate was made and when the US-American musician returned to Eastern Europe to support Michael Gira on his solo tour in late 2019, Mazurkiewicz reached out to him with the idea of booking some studio time before Gira’s two concerts in Warsaw. »Recording was very fun and easy,« remembers Westberg. »It was just two people enjoying hearing and reacting to what the other is doing.«

»First Man in the Moon« is not however a plain document of these improvised sessions, but also shaped by Mazurkiewicz’s approach as a composer. Once the recordings were finished, he selected and edited the recorded material, refining the peculiar dialogue between the guitarist’s meditative drones and bright chords and his own rhythmic yet subtle approach to playing the double bass, sometimes plucking the strings and occasionally using his bow to underscore Westberg’s fleeting melodies, but also using the instrument in unconventional ways to generate sound. 

A feeling of weightlessness prevails throughout the aptly-titled »First Man in the Moon.« Even at their most abstract however, these five improvisations-turned-compositions remain tangible, lively, and joyfully explorative. It is a record that you wouldn’t expect from either of these musicians, but the logical result of two idiosyncratic minds sharing not only space and time, but also their respective visions with each other.

Homage to Dick Raaijmakers (excerpt 1)

Thomas Ankersmit

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