Aw YEAH, you guys…Guess who’s got TWO THUMBS and is about to release their “most ambitious body of work” in the form of a new full-length album next month?!
Oh…me? GOD, NO. (My most ambitious bodies of work are usually inordinately-tall peanut butter sandwiches.) I was talking about French-based composer, visual artist, and (someday!) official TMT artist-in-residence Félicia Atkinson.
Atkinson recently announced that her newest meticulously constructed collection of lapping noise waves, found-sound clatter, droning isolated chord tones, and precariously-balanced spoken word snippets — entitled Hand In Hand — will be released on May 4 by the equally ambitious peanut-butter-sandwich-of-a-label that is Shelter Press.
Composed “over the year of 2016 at EMS during a snow storm and at home in Brittany,” the album employs a purposefully hodgepodge array of “high” and “low” spoken-word samples (culled from “house plant instruction books, Desert Magazine old issues, architecture manuals, JG Ballard and [Philip] K. Dick’s books, as well as her own poetry”) to explore a theme no less ambitious than of of the utter and complete inter-relatedness and dependence of all living and non-living things upon one another for survival and significance. But don’t take my little old word for it. Let’s take it straight to the epic, triple-decker peanut butter sandwich of a press release:
Hand in Hand is arid and warm in its whole synchrony and opposition Days are burning and nights are made of ice. Coyotes are exchanging sounds with rattles snakes while bunnies are hiding. Strident modular sounds are tearing apart minimal beats and drones. The stories told by A Voice to the auditor are no longer fictions and become slowly reality[…]Plants, galaxies, animals, machines, Hand in Hand.
Almost hard to believe that this entire awesome/mundane universe of fused-opposites can be distilled down onto 2xLP, CD, and digital iterations, any of which you can pre-order any old time you want from Shelter Press. But, yup, that’s pretty much the deal. (Actually, maybe “any old time you want” is a bit misleading: there’s only 500 copies of the vinyl and 1000 of the digipak CD available.) But either way, instead of just standing around making towering peanut butter sandwiches all day while you wait for your portable copy of the entire universe to get delivered to you, why not stream an excerpt from it down below? Trust me; it’ll be just as satisfying.
Hand in Hand tracklisting (vinyl version):
01. I’m Following You
02. Valis
03. Curious In Epidavros
04. Adaptation Assez Facile
05. Monstera Deliciosa
06. Visnaga
07. A House A Dance A Poem
08. Vermillions
09. Hier Le Désert
10. No Fear But Anticipation
More about: Félicia Atkinson
