Take a piece of string, thread it through an entirely metal object (maybe a coat hanger or a wire shelf from your oven), wrap each end around your fingers, bend over forward, and, with the object hanging freely, put your fingers in your ears and gently tap the object against a hard surface.
Félicia Atkinson is a conversationalist in a world of sometimes sealed artistic enclaves. She avoids the critical staring contest, that prolonged game of theoretical wink murder, where Bourdieu’s gaze meets “the critical gaze” meets the “male gaze” meets the “artistic gaze” meets the “symbolic capital” of some other unnerving gaze. Or was that just a blink?
With all the impressions that Visions / Voices might leave on you — disorientation, joy, diverging moments of memory, escape — the one that struck me most was a feeling of creative cataclysm. The need to create. This is an album that holds a reminder deep within its core of how joyful making music and art can be, not in some deep structural quest for a eugenics of sound, but in the rewarding work of the “experimental” as a process, rather than a delineated generic other.
Although the aforementioned “Big B” might say that “a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded,” he misses the power of broken codes, of residual artistic content, of blurred disciplinary boundaries, of transgressions that engage rather than exclude, of mistakes and duff notes. This is where Félicia Atkinson shines.
For an attention to sonic detail like hers shouldn’t mean an assumption of exclusivity. Visions / Voices is inclusive yet challenging, coherent yet discursive.
But wait! There is one thing that’s exclusive about it for now; you can listen to the whole album below for the first time. Eight tracks from three years, tessellated into a stunning whole.
No strings needed for now.
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Visions / Voices is out March 29 on Umor Rex.
• Félicia Atkinson: http://feliciaatkinson.be
• Umor Rex: http://www.umor-rex.org