On her latest side for Portraits GRM, the label which now operates in collaboration with her own Shelter Press following the untimely death in 2021 of Peter Rehberg, the French musician Félicia Atkinson conjures the haunts and attitudes of the American modernist painter and draftswoman Georgia O’Keeffe through snatches of soft-spoken word, faint outcrops of piano, field recordings and the buzz and chime of arid electronics. Described as a meditation on the mystery of art and the act of creation, Atkinson draws not only from O’Keeffe’s cherished canvases but from her home in the village of Abiquiú, her summer house twelve miles north at Ghost Ranch and her New Mexico surrounds, as daybreak tones stretch like swathes of light over the plains or pitch and drop like searchlights ferreting out new vistas, waves of static decay play like fraying strings or the placid chirp of crickets, and piano keys fall in spurts like steep chasms or surge up in elephantine billows. Over the patient hum of these ‘somnambulic oscillations’, Atkinson would see through O’Keeffe’s eyes, addressing the painter directly or inhabiting her words, uttering lines like ‘my skin feels close to the earth when I walk out into the red hills’ which were presented in conjunction with the Tate Modern retrospective My Faraway Nearby a few months prior to the onset of the pandemic. On the flip side of the physical release, Richard Chartier of the LINE imprint continues to dwell at the frontier of audible sound, conjuring the electrical impulses of the sinus node and those heartswells which pinch and flutter at our heartbeat.
For her first release on vinyl, the acclaimed composer Cassandra Miller coils and contorts two disparate pieces of music in the form of a song by an anonymous Sicilian cart driver, recorded by the ethnologists Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella sometime in the mid-fifties, and the third movement of Beethoven’s late string quartet in A minor, a ‘holy song of thanks from a convalescent’ as the German maestro at least temporarily recovered from an intestinal illness. While the caterwauling of her ‘Traveller Song’ might have ‘more in common with a quasi-shamanistic keening than anything Sicilian’, for her interpretation of the ‘Thanksong’ the composer sought to sustain an atmosphere of hushed reawakening and thoughtful reflection. Miller recorded herself singing along to each of the individual parts of Beethoven’s quartet, establishing an aural score which she then handed to her longtime collaborators Quatuor Bozzini. Listening to their respective parts through headphones and playing by ear, the Montreal foursome are joined by the British soprano Juliet Fraser, who sings ‘as slowly and quietly as possible’ over the resultant piece. A far cry from the mannered style of so much contemporary music, where Beethoven dedicated his ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ to the deity instead Miller, Quatuor Bozzini and Juliet Fraser suffuse the sacred with the mundane, as a smattering of recording booth chatter towards the close of ‘Thanksong’ adds to the air of communality and companionly uplift.
Blowing the doors off genre delineations even as she masters single-minded kuduro, romantic kizomba, frenetic batida and syrupy tarraxinha beats, the Lisbon-born and Bordeaux-bred producer Nídia returns for her third long-play on the dance bastion Príncipe, drawing upon her mixed roots in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde while paying homage to the decisive role played by female freedom fighters as PAIGC struggled for independence from Portuguese rule during the sixties and early seventies. Serving as an oneiric guide after first introducing listeners to his diorama of soil, moss and tide pools, the Finnish sound designer Atte Elias Kantonen lands on Soda Gong for more wistful electronics which sound like an agglomeration of suction cups, gargling throats, inundated propellers and mechanized bird noises, enveloping the lucky ticket bearer with the utmost sincerity in his misty yet glimmering polyphonic soundscape.
Lawrence English unearths a bootleg recording of a Tenniscoats performance in a Tasmanian hotel from back in February of 2009, capturing both a flicker of his former life as a drummer and an audience thoroughly enraptured with the playing of Saya and Takashi Ueno as they unfold their winsome brand of avant-pop. Saddled with field recordings from her home in the desert of El Djerid plus tombak and modular arrangements from the Franco-Iranian percussionist Cinna Peyghamy, the Tunisian dub practitioner Azu Tiwaline engenders a state of prolonged hypnosis through one of the entheogenic rave rhythms at the heart of her upcoming album The Fifth Dream. And specialising in the daegeum and sogeum, side-blown bamboo flutes with a rich history in the musical culture of Korea, the composer and performer Dasom Baek walks the tightrope between sweet solitude and community, exploring some of the gaps and possibilities inherent to modernity on her second solo effort Mirror City with accompaniment from Minseon Choi on the ajeang, a wide zither with strings of twisted silk.
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Félicia Atkinson – ‘Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe)’
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Richard Chartier – ‘Recurrence.Expansion’
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Dasom Baek – ‘Tightrope (외줄타기)’
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Azu Tiwaline – ‘Long Hypnosis’
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Cassandra Miller – ‘Thanksong’
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Atte Elias Kantonen – ‘snail loves moth’
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