Félicia Atkinson – “Wilhelmina, Glaciers Chasms“
TX: SUNDAY, 23RD NOVEMBER. FROM 8PM
Following her commissioned pieces Ni Envers Ni Endroit Que cette Roche Brulante (INA GRM 2022) and Thinking Iceberg (CTM 2024), the French composer Félicia Atkinson comes back to her interest for nature and its preservation, as well as her interest in painting. ‘Wilhelmina, Glaciers Chasms’, is an electro-acoustic piece for voice, field recordings, fender rhodes and electronics, inspired by the paintings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, especially ‘Glacier Chasm’ from 1951.
Transparencies, blue and grey, super-positions, free forms, resonance and sustains will infuse in this new electro-acoustic piece dedicated to the XXth century female Scottish painter.
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The french electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, midi instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both french and english.
Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character’s tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist.
Atkinson lives on the wild coast of Normandy and has played music since the early 2000s. In addition to collaborations with numerous other musicians she has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson.
https://shelter-press.com/felicia-atkinson
https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/
