Félicia Atkinson — The Flower and the Vessel (Jul. 5th, 2019) 
Location: Rennes, France
Album release: Jul. 5th, 2019
Record Label: Shelter Press
Format: 2LP / CD / Digital
Duration: 70:03
Tracks:
01. L’Après~Midi 0:56
02. Moderato Cantabile 7:59
03. Shirley to Shirley 4:14
04. Un Ovale Vert 3:49
05. You Have To Have Eyes 8:02
06. Linguistics Of Atoms 5:58
07. Lush 3:38
08. Joan 6:45
09. Open / Ouvre 4:02
10. L’Enfant Et Le Poulpe 5:58
11. Des Pierres 18:42
Credits:
★ All the music, mixing and production are by Félicia Atkinson.
★ Some parts of “Moderato Cantabile” have been recorded live at Issue Project Room in New York on March 31, 2018.
★ “Open/Ouvre” and “Joan” have been recorded at Type Foundry Studio by Adam Selzer in Portland in April 2018.
★ “Des Pierres” has been recorded at MusicUnit in Montreuil on April 25, 2018 by Martin Antiphon and has been produced by Stephen O’Malley, who also plays the guitar on this song.
★ The mastering is by Rashad Becker.
★ The photographs by Julien Carreyn with assistance of Naomi Tamamura, and the design by Bartolomé Sanson.
★ Some lyrics on this album have been inspired by an interview of Shirley Jaffe by Shirley Kaneda, the poem “Turning” by David Antin, an interview of St. EOM by Tom Patterson, and the book La lecture des pierres by Roger Caillois.
Review
By Kevin Press, Jul 05, 2019; Score: ★★★★★★★★
✹ Opening as it does, with barely a whisper, Félicia Atkinson’s The Flower and the Vessel is clearly a less~is~more proposition. Given the recent burst of interest in autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) recordings, it is tempting to dismiss releases of this sort as late to the party. It’s a bit like the mass marketing of the New Age category in the mid~1980s, which ruined ambient music for a generation.
✹ But it is a mistake to view Atkinson’s work in this light. The Parisian composer and poet approaches her work formally, and with great seriousness. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts degree with honours at Les Beaux Arts de Paris; currently, Atkinson is a PhD candidate studying musicology at Rennes 2 University.
✹ According to her bio, her work focuses on “improvisation, deep listening, cut ups, duration, silence and noise, musique concrète, poetic spaces, deserts, forests, animism, abstraction, ambien[ce] and language.”
✹ The 11 pieces featured on The Flower and the Vessel are surprisingly complex, given Atkinson’s delicate approach to her music. It is a powerful combination; she’s able to present work that is at times genuinely difficult, but because it’s performed with such careful subtlety, there isn’t a single sharp edge to be found on the album’s 70 minutes.
✹ The album’s instrumentation contributes to this palatability. Her piano figures as prominently as her voice. We are treated to delay effects, iPad gamelan patterns, gong, vibraphone, marimba and field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert.
✹ While English is spoken, the disc is rooted in French music history. Atkinson references three touchstone recordings: Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges,” Claude Debussy’s “La Mer” and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.” Atkinson’s well~informed take on minimalism is not to be missed.
✹ https://exclaim.ca/
Label: http://shelter-press.org/
Website: https://feliciaatkinson.com/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/feliciaatkinson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/atkinsonfelicia
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/feliciaatkinson
Bandcamp: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/
ABOUT:
✹ French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms — how even the quietest creative act ripples outward in unforeseen ways, a whisper with no fixed meaning. Her latest work pursues this notion in a more literal and lasting fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour, in impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities. She describes it as “a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.” Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself “What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?” The answer gradually revealed itself: “With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody.”
✹ In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower & The Vessel. The album’s 11 songs span a vast pantheon of whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences on this particular collection: Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (“a scary opera for kids”), Debussy’s “La Mer” (for its union of narration and music) and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” (as an exercise in negative space, irony without cynicism, and “melody with doubt”). There’s certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks, however veiled, abstracted, or unorthodox. Melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut~up poems and interviews over delay~refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia.
✹ Although much of Atkinson’s past discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, The Flower & The Vessel ventures farther into silence, absence, and voiceless wilderness. Among her sources of inspiration were “women who wonder, dream, and create vacant spaces in their art,” as well as Ikebana flower arrangements, which reflect her own relationship with listening: “structure combined with everyday noises, selecting them to make a sparse music bouquet.” Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene.
✹ Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson’s synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19~minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, “Des Pierres,” is one of the album’s few pieces tracked in a proper studio (Music Unit in Montreuil, France) but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower & The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Atkinson’s voice flickers like a flame, framed by slabs of shadowy feedback. Her process may be personal is but its impact ripples to the edges of existence: “How does the act of creation connect us, not only to history, but to the cosmic? It’s a process of taking, and then giving back. It makes us belong to the world.”
✹ The Flower and The Vessel features original artwork by Julien Carreyn, and is mastered by Rashad Becker at D+M. Available on 2xLP vinyl with printed artwork on inner and outer reverse~board jackets and multipanels digipack. Out July 5th, 2019 on Shelter Press.
______________________________________________
Album release: Jul. 5th, 2019
Record Label: Shelter Press
Format: 2LP / CD / Digital
Duration: 70:03
Tracks:
01. L’Après~Midi 0:56
02. Moderato Cantabile 7:59
03. Shirley to Shirley 4:14
04. Un Ovale Vert 3:49
05. You Have To Have Eyes 8:02
06. Linguistics Of Atoms 5:58
07. Lush 3:38
08. Joan 6:45
09. Open / Ouvre 4:02
10. L’Enfant Et Le Poulpe 5:58
11. Des Pierres 18:42
Credits:
★ All the music, mixing and production are by Félicia Atkinson.
★ Some parts of “Moderato Cantabile” have been recorded live at Issue Project Room in New York on March 31, 2018.
★ “Open/Ouvre” and “Joan” have been recorded at Type Foundry Studio by Adam Selzer in Portland in April 2018.
★ “Des Pierres” has been recorded at MusicUnit in Montreuil on April 25, 2018 by Martin Antiphon and has been produced by Stephen O’Malley, who also plays the guitar on this song.
★ The mastering is by Rashad Becker.
★ The photographs by Julien Carreyn with assistance of Naomi Tamamura, and the design by Bartolomé Sanson.
★ Some lyrics on this album have been inspired by an interview of Shirley Jaffe by Shirley Kaneda, the poem “Turning” by David Antin, an interview of St. EOM by Tom Patterson, and the book La lecture des pierres by Roger Caillois.
Review
By Kevin Press, Jul 05, 2019; Score: ★★★★★★★★
✹ Opening as it does, with barely a whisper, Félicia Atkinson’s The Flower and the Vessel is clearly a less~is~more proposition. Given the recent burst of interest in autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) recordings, it is tempting to dismiss releases of this sort as late to the party. It’s a bit like the mass marketing of the New Age category in the mid~1980s, which ruined ambient music for a generation.
✹ But it is a mistake to view Atkinson’s work in this light. The Parisian composer and poet approaches her work formally, and with great seriousness. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts degree with honours at Les Beaux Arts de Paris; currently, Atkinson is a PhD candidate studying musicology at Rennes 2 University.
✹ According to her bio, her work focuses on “improvisation, deep listening, cut ups, duration, silence and noise, musique concrète, poetic spaces, deserts, forests, animism, abstraction, ambien[ce] and language.”
✹ The 11 pieces featured on The Flower and the Vessel are surprisingly complex, given Atkinson’s delicate approach to her music. It is a powerful combination; she’s able to present work that is at times genuinely difficult, but because it’s performed with such careful subtlety, there isn’t a single sharp edge to be found on the album’s 70 minutes.
✹ The album’s instrumentation contributes to this palatability. Her piano figures as prominently as her voice. We are treated to delay effects, iPad gamelan patterns, gong, vibraphone, marimba and field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert.
✹ While English is spoken, the disc is rooted in French music history. Atkinson references three touchstone recordings: Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges,” Claude Debussy’s “La Mer” and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.” Atkinson’s well~informed take on minimalism is not to be missed.
✹ https://exclaim.ca/
Label: http://shelter-press.org/
Website: https://feliciaatkinson.com/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/feliciaatkinson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/atkinsonfelicia
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/feliciaatkinson
Bandcamp: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/
ABOUT:
✹ French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms — how even the quietest creative act ripples outward in unforeseen ways, a whisper with no fixed meaning. Her latest work pursues this notion in a more literal and lasting fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour, in impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities. She describes it as “a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.” Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself “What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?” The answer gradually revealed itself: “With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody.”
✹ In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower & The Vessel. The album’s 11 songs span a vast pantheon of whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences on this particular collection: Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (“a scary opera for kids”), Debussy’s “La Mer” (for its union of narration and music) and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” (as an exercise in negative space, irony without cynicism, and “melody with doubt”). There’s certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks, however veiled, abstracted, or unorthodox. Melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut~up poems and interviews over delay~refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia.
✹ Although much of Atkinson’s past discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, The Flower & The Vessel ventures farther into silence, absence, and voiceless wilderness. Among her sources of inspiration were “women who wonder, dream, and create vacant spaces in their art,” as well as Ikebana flower arrangements, which reflect her own relationship with listening: “structure combined with everyday noises, selecting them to make a sparse music bouquet.” Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene.
✹ Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson’s synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19~minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, “Des Pierres,” is one of the album’s few pieces tracked in a proper studio (Music Unit in Montreuil, France) but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower & The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Atkinson’s voice flickers like a flame, framed by slabs of shadowy feedback. Her process may be personal is but its impact ripples to the edges of existence: “How does the act of creation connect us, not only to history, but to the cosmic? It’s a process of taking, and then giving back. It makes us belong to the world.”
✹ The Flower and The Vessel features original artwork by Julien Carreyn, and is mastered by Rashad Becker at D+M. Available on 2xLP vinyl with printed artwork on inner and outer reverse~board jackets and multipanels digipack. Out July 5th, 2019 on Shelter Press.
______________________________________________