For her latest album Promenades the composer Félicia Atkinson delivers a set of moody, gauzy and somehow even furtive piano-based songs which she describes as a ‘sound meditation recorded with a Nord keyboard during winter while thinking of spring’.
She invites listeners to wander through these six immersive compositions, which are named after colours from black, blue and green to rose, ochre and mauve, in both name and manner more obscure than the open landscapes and steep phantasms of her last record Space as an Instrument.
The acclaimed, even fabled electroacoustic musician – whose other recent work has explored private spaces including the life and art of the New Mexico transplant and modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe – really hunkers down here into a mode of pensive abstraction, spurning field recordings as every drone or ambient treatment, each plunked string and the audible sound of her shifting in her chair seems to ratchet up the tension and grasp and tug at the surrounding air.
