Article
Ten Questions with Nicolay

Albums
Aera
Apricot Rail
Darcy James Argue
Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi
Félicia Atkinson
Atom TM
Black Jazz Consortium
Borghi and Teager
Kate Carr
Jace Clayton
Nicholas Cords
Cosmin TRG
Benjamin Damage
T. Dimuzio / Voice of Eye
Field Rotation
Footprintz
Garnica
Stefan Goldmann
Good Luck Mr. Gorsky
Darren Harper
Chihei Hatakeyama
Jerusalem In My Heart
Marsen Jules
Philippe Lamy
Mary Lattimore
Linear Bells
Jay-Dea López
Andrew McPherson
Markus Mehr
Oneirogen
Fabio Orsi & pimmon
Quicksails
Simian Mobile Disco
Colin Stetson
The Third Man
Simon Whetham
Yuco

Compilations / Mixes
Art Department
Balance presents jozif
+FE Music: The Reworks
Ruede Hagelstein
Inscriptions Vol. 2
Rebel Rave 3
Your Victorian Breasts

EPs / Cassettes / Singles
Broken Chip
City of Satellites
Fescal
Isan
jffstnhs
Librah
Yann Novak
Simon Whetham

Félicia Atkinson: Visions / Voices
Umor Rex

Strange visions indeed are conjured by visual artist / musician Félicia Atkinson (aka Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier) on this seventy-one minute, double-LP set (a small number of which are pressed on translucent green vinyl, no less), with track titles such as “Infant Vampire” and “The Owls” suggesting as much. Hers is a music as haunted as Grouper's, and certainly the similarities between the artists' styles is evident on Visions / Voices' opening piece “This Impermanent Gold” when Atkinson's gossamer voice drifts alongside a rustic breeze of detuned guitar strums like some long-suffering spirit desperate to complete its earthly sentence. The material meanders in a daze, lost in a half-demented reverie, its lo-fi character calling to mind kindred spirits like Loren MazzaCane Connors and Charalambides.

Most of the tracks on Visions / Voices, which compiles three years of work that previously appeared on cassettes and CD-Rs, stretch out liberally—“The Owls” the most extreme case at eighteen minutes. Consequently, Atkinson is able to surrender to her cryptic muse in uncompromising manner and burrow deeply into the cobweb-strewn recesses of her psyche. Organ, electric piano, guitar, electronics, celtic harp, and vocals are the main ingredients in her alchemical brew. Representative of the release is “All the Roads Are Circular,” a blurry, reverb-drenched meditation with electronic warble and electric guitar shards colliding at its fractured center, and “Hooves Drummed,” which shows that Atkinson can fashion a shimmering death-drone with the best of ‘em.

A Grimm Fairy Tale in aural form, “Infant Vampire” is suitably gothic in tone as it presents multiple wordless strands of Atkinson's mist-covered voice escaping from the center of a forest. Even more enchanted is “The Owls,” a delicate, psychedelic-folk wonderland that plays like some mushrooms-enhanced collaboration between Popol Vuh and Steeleye Span. Being the album's centerpiece, it can't help but overshadow the release's last cuts, “Franny” and “Badlands,” even if they're as haunting as anything else on the album. Regardless, listening to Atkinson's music is a little bit like scanning the woods with a flashlight at night: an initially vaguely unsettling experience that grows progressively more eerie when one's imagination takes hold and all manner of spirits lurking in the shadows begin to materialize.

April 2013