![]() Her instrumentals are equally effective in breaking the third wall. Read out over ghostly pulses, Atkinson creates a scene and then makes the listener an actor in it. And look.” The structure echoes the minimalism of Martin’s artwork. On ‘The House That Agnes Built’ (the Agnes of the title is the painter Agnes Martin), a slow stream of single words solidify into instructions, “You just go there and sit. Listening to Image Language turns us into detectives and archaeologists. Whether you agree with Derrida or not, Atkinson reminds us it’s still possible to speculate, to look for the clues that give us an insight into our world and another’s. In other words, we all live in our unique islands, a distinct perspective defined by our context, rather than a single world. II, Jacques Derrida argued “there is no world, there are only islands.” He writes that an “infinite difference” makes no two experiences of reality the same. Atkinson leaves the trace, and then encourages the listener to work backwards and find what’s behind it. The mirror image of that struggle to translate ideas in your head into words. That might sound like work, but it’s rewarding work. It means we need to meet Atkinson half-way, to be active participants in what she’s trying to convey. As the liner notes explain, they are exercises in putting multiple perspectives, human and non-human, into conversation. There’s a lot to process in these nine tracks, but what begins as enigmatic starts to become tangible. Elsewhere her tracks bristle with celestial keys, fragmented electronics and crumpled acoustic ephemera to create a sonic terrain somewhere between a panoramic landscape and an intimate voice note. Opener ‘La Brume’s rasping sax and swelling chords are positively Lynchian until about four minutes in, when there’s a flash of moonlit keys and the sax softens to momentarily lift into a wave of cosmic soul music. Her musical arrangements are as lucid as her words. Give it something to connect to and unpick.Ĭryptic without ever feeling deliberately evasive, Atkinson encourages us to join dots, imagine scenes, perhaps construct a fleeting mental picture of the worlds she describes. I open my feet to the fresh dirt.” The sounds and words hush my over- (or is it under?) stimulated brain. ![]() I bless the oranges and I feel blessed by the oranges. At first it’s a word here or there, a gorgeous piano arrives as my ears start to latch onto full sentences: “I lay on the ground. Initially in French, a language I don’t understand, a new layer of comprehension comes when some of the speech switches to English. The speaker on my desk emits a flickering drone and a swell of overlapping voices, from ‘The Lake is Speaking’, the second track on Félicia Atkinson’s new album, Image Language. My brain is numb goo from a day spent looking at spreadsheets and news feeds. I’m sitting in a room, perhaps similar, perhaps different, to the one you’re in now.
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