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LP
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SHELTER 101LP
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Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Limpid As The Solitudes cuts through sound-making techniques to enter a new zone of sonic revelations. The record recalls the turn-of-the-century Mille Plateaux glitch era, the warmth of La Monte Young's drones, acousmatic non-space recordings made by GRM artists, 4AD's floor-gazing guitar sound, and blissfully diverse field recordings. But, one could equally equate it with entirely different recording sources. Limpid As The Solitudes has a widescreen sound that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Warm, comforting and also unsettling in unpredictable ways. Deliberate yet exploratory, it's a record composed of opposites and contrasts, following historical guidelines yet also throwing them out of the window. To describe the album as ambient would indicate passive engagement with the sound; leave it to play in the background and one could miss a lot of the joy. Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma describe the record as a series of postcards - things and sounds that happen vertically as a slow ascension, vessels communicating in dreams. In this collaborative recording, there is a feeling of "becoming" - a concrete sound turns into a electronic sound that turns into a spiral-like melody which then furls/unfurls at the same time. The album title as well as track titles, are all verses stolen from Sylvia Plath's poems, Atkinson notes, "like dropped pearls from a lost collar." Trying further to capture the record's poetic impulses, it reflects "Empathy to objects and nature's elements, meteorological states, seasons that answer to your heart, granular etchings carved and sustained to create a blurred sentimental landscape. The finale is more optimistic than Plath's poetry. Love and lyricism win, the music soaring from deep water to interstellar galaxies." The cover is another key, an image by Julien Carreyn of a young woman wearing destroyed jeans, playing with bubble wrap. The image is intended to give the viewer an eerie 1990's feeling that echoes the recording and films by Hal Hartley or Wong Kar Wai. Be sure to come back to this record more than once; it's then that it's power will work. Recall the sound of a lover, a garden once walked through, an echo of a record once loved. To be appreciated, "Limpid As The Solitudes" requires immersion as if in a hot spring, letting the sounds float and alter perceptions and memories. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at D+M. Printed photographs by Julien Carreyn on glossy inner and outer sleeve.
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LP
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SHELTER 070LP
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French artist Félicia Atkinson teams up with New York-based experimentalist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma for Comme Un Seul Narcisse, their first collaborative effort. Recorded between NYC and the Alps, Comme Un Seul Narcisse is an epistolary conversation of postmodern times between Cantu-Ledesma and Atkinson, who -- strangely enough -- met just once in person, in San Francisco in 2009. But the record is also a detour. Though it follows Cantu-Ledesma's haunting A Year With 13 Moons (Mexican Summer, 2015) and Atkinson's most intimate effort to date, A Readymade Ceremony (SHELTER 055CD/LP, 2015), their combined music sounds like everything but these works, filling in the gaps between their solo outputs. What is it to wander? What is it to be -- as Baudelaire would put it -- a flâneur from one continent to another? From the subways of NYC to the crooked trails of the Alps, the two musicians exchanged fragments of sounds and melodies, composing and building a new landscape neither bucolic nor urban, just outside nomenclatures or the postcard images of site-specific recordings. Here there's no specific site but a construction built from heterogeneous elements brought together in a virtual ecosystem. What is it to wander . . . in a non-specific site? Is it a fragmentation? A sedimentation? The title of the album and its tracks are inherited from Susan Sontag's application of Baudelaire's flâneur to photography in On Photography (1977): a flâneur sees himself in the documents and media he uses and integrates them into his own perception, and the act of recording becomes again an act of feeling. Somewhere between some Fluxus collages and more contemporary musicality, this "neither/nor" music confronts abstraction with the impermanence of concrete materials, building something on its own, like a standing still ceramic or a pond. Comme Un Seul Narcisse is a record to live with -- or, as Jacques Rancière would put it, a partage du sensible ("distribution of the sensible") -- standing as it is, unresolved, but not as a simulacra. There's no image to watch here but the possibility of a shared a moment, inviting the listener to complete the experience. Mastered by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering. Photography by John Wiese after a piece by Félicia Atkinson. Design by Bartolomé Sanson. First edition of 550 copies.
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