Félicia Atkinson’s spoken word accompaniments to the tracks on her new album are Gallic and intimate. Her gently accented words slide close into your ears as she speaks, on opening track ‘The Healing’, about contemplation “standing but not facing completely what’s in front of me”. She talks over a lone piano playing a melancholy tune, the faint flutter of bird song, and the sounds made by a human rustling a sound recorder. Atkinson’s work is based around field recordings, which she makes in conventional settings – that is, outside the studio. But the album is also based around the piano, which Atkinson records on her phone, blending field and studio in a way that undermines standard musical practice and contributes to her unsettled, multi-faceted sound world.
Space In An Instrument, as its title implies, is an album with cosmic themes – the wide spaces around and above us – but also the spaces within. Atkinson’s intimate soundscapes and layers of consequential and inconsequential noise, registered equally by her portable devices, are a very effective medium for opening up the interior landscapes. Her voice is shamelessly alluring, sometimes intelligible, sometimes used as an instrument, rather than a language device. Who doesn’t want French whispered gently in their ear? Yet, Atkinson stays the right side of self-indulgence, balancing reassurance with disturbance, the voice sometimes overly insistent, or oddly doubled. Meanwhile, electronic landscapes draw a constantly shifting soundscape of intentional and accidental noise. Accurately reflecting the recesses of the mind, Atkinson’s music is never quite serene or fully at rest.
The central track, the thirteen-minute ‘Thinking Like an Iceberg’, is edited from a live performance made in response to Olivier Remaud’s book of the same title, which imagines icebergs as conscious and sentient. Atkinson uses distant, majestic synthesisers, electronic shifting and cracking, and French whispered at the portals of the ear to generate wide-screen drama. The track is all-engrossing, and speaks subtly of climate change and human destruction. This, and the entire album, created a very strong sense of aural space, with sounds precisely located in the mix as though moving through space. We can hear the iceberg advancing, millimetre by millimetre, with deep squeaks, creaks and groans.
Atkinson describes her music as existing “on the verge of understanding and not understanding.” This is a neat way to encapsulate tracks that grow more complex, the more you listen to them, just as the experience of live listening does too. There is nothing that could not be conventionally described – piano melodies, synthesizer tones, gentle percussion – but the effect places layer upon layer upon layer with a complexity that reveals itself only gradually. The influences of minimalist and avant-garde composition are strong, and of field recordists such as Chris Watson – but the music also has a sharpness and clarity reminiscent of Ben Frost, and a density of sound like Jon Hassell. It is a gorgeous, masterly and strangely addictive album.
