Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

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)

HELM — Olympic Mess (PAN 63) 2xLP/CD/DL
Release Date: 15th June 2015
http://p-a-n.org

HELM - Olympic Mess (PAN 63)

recorded in early 2016 with the latvian radio choir  🕊🐚

Andy Stott - Song For Chance

uon + Exael - Piano

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)

XKatedral presents the first full-length release of the work of Swedish composer David Granström. In four interrelated pieces, Granström’s new collection of sound work – A distant color, secluded – invites us to take part in the creation and destruction of perceptual worlds; worlds whose interiors are at once manifestations of vast topological complexity, and of minimalist, pure non-dimensionality.

David Granström (b. 1987) is a composer and sound artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. His sound work is characterized by harmonic simplicity and spatio-textural complexity, employing sounds of both synthetic and acoustic origin. Part of Granström’s practice consists in researching new methods for working algorithmically with real-time sound synthesis and precision-tuned harmony, a work which is technically realized by employing tools that he himself develops. Earlier releases of Granström’s sound work includes the limited-edition cassette Ephemeris, also on XKatedral.

You can pre-order the album here:

https://xkatedral.bandcamp.com/alb…/a-distant-color-secluded

David Granström - Waning Moon

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

Peel

KMRU 'Why Are You Here' (EMEGO 289)

Written, recorded and produced in 2016 with Jemma, Joel, Laurie and Ruth at Green Door Studios, Glasgow

Engineered by Emily

Épater

Track from the upcoming DE NOR 2020 compilation LP/DL, out on January 11, 2021!

David Granström - Waning Moon

XKatedral

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