Double LP
Potential career high point for Felicia Atkinson with this latest long (and it is long - over an hour) player for the increasingly vital Shelter Press imprint. A meditation on the intersecting poetics of voice, language and sound, it expresses a broad palette of approaches and sonics, drawing from various aspects of drone, minimal composition, fourth-world aesthetics, vaporous jazz, and in its frequent moments of confessional intimacy, a kind of choral-like folk. There are many contrasting moments of beauty and transgression (see the transition from the ECM-like instrumental opener La Brume into the elemental solitude of the piano/vocal led 11 minute The Lake Is Speaking), but the key anchor throughout the majority of these nine pieces - and the element that holds together what are sometimes quite disparate approaches - is Akinson's voice, flitting between French and English, whispering her Sylvia Plath inspired poetry in a way so as to only just be audible. The meaning, like its sound, is on the fringes of comprehension, very much like how Robert Ashley utilised the human voice, as both texture and expression. Through that, Atkinson constructs a narrative through which the listener is guided across the record, crucially remembering to situate the person at the centre of the music, where they always should be.
