Felicia Atkinson - Hand In Hand 2xLP

Label: Shelter Press

Our Review:

Hand In Hand begins and ends with the support of two stately institutions of avant-garde electronic music. The French polyglot Félicia Atkinson began composing this album while in residence at EMS in Stockholm in 2016; and upon completion of the work, she exhibited a seven hour extended version the following year at GRM in Paris. Lucid, yet cracked, Hand In Hand emerges as an enchanting fever-dream of telepathic thought, disconnected desire and acute emotion which all expand from a myriad of appropriated and detourned texts.

In years past she first began recording under the moniker Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, whose droning plainsongs paralleled those of Natural Snow Buildings and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. The somnolent ambience of her first fruits has gradually slipped away amidst an intimate, idiosyncratic hybrid of spoken text, deconstructed electronica and hypnotic abstractions. Where there once were songs buried under six feet of snow, there are now asymmetrical sounds upon which balance Atkinson's sibilant whisperings in English. She quotes wholesale from J.G. Ballard, Phillip K. Dick, architectural manuals, instructions on caring for house plants and texts of her own construct. Amidst the elegantly dismal arrangements for rhodes organ motifs (think Dirty Harry) and the filagrees of spluttered waveform table cycles, these texts hang a constellations in the night sky. Infinitely detailed references with their contexts voided through the power of the razor blade. Brilliant.