Felicia Atkinson - Echo

Issued last year on cassette as part of the Documenting Sound collection, Echo now finds its way to a limited vinyl pressing and, along with it, my ears - i'd missed it first time around, as is fairly common with these tape-only releases. Seems almost criminal that this would have been occluded from most on initial release. Much like with the Ulla record from the same series, Atkinson wrote Echo during the early days of the first lockdown in 2020, translating that experience into an intimate portrait of domestic life under duress. Taking inspiration from Derek Jarman's Garden, there's a notable concession to the simple privacies and necessities of isolation, these soft-touched compositions sprout and flow as if simpatico with nature, with daily internal life, with the elements, a series of bubbling passages constructed on found sound, sax, piano and room-ambience that lead to gentle revelations. Echo is wholesome and moving in a way that avoids the ecstatic or epiphanous, dealing in more subtle, introverted personal discoveries. A beautiful piece of work i could have done with enjoying all last year, hiding away from the world.