Francusko-belgijska vizualna umjetnica i zvukovna skulptorica stvara zvukovne vitraže za napuštene crkve ili stripove od bluesa, jazza, opskurnog folka, dronea i psihodelije.
Félicia nastupa pod svojim imenom i kao Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier.
soundcloud + streaming
Artist and musician Félicia Atkinson has produced a string of well-received releases under both her own name and monikers such as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier and Rivier Amur, as well as exhibiting and publishing visual and text-based artworks. “Visions / Voices” collects three years’ worth of material previously available on limited run cassettes and CD-Rs, re-mastered for a wider 2 x LP release. The eight tracks are quite diverse, but followers of Atkinson’s recent output will know what to expect: plonking ostinato drones, dreamy, sometimes feverish colours, slightly out-of-tune instruments, and hazy reverb-drenched voice. Borrowing liberally from a wide range of sources, from classic blues and jazz to more obscure folk, drone, and psychedelia, Atkinson manages to draw it all together into a sound that is recognisably hers: a little too off-kilter to be whimsical, its charm a little too rough and ragged to be saccharine. It’s an approach that pushes all the right dreamy lo-fi buttons without sacrificing substance in the name of style.
My favourite moments from “Visions / Voices” are the ones that sound like nothing else I could name — the best I could come up with for album anchor-point “The Owls” was an ensemble trying to play Steve Reich phase music in the dark, at half speed and in separate rooms, but even this image pales in comparison to the piece itself. Closing track “Badlands” is equally gorgeous, a drowsy voice muttering in sleep, off-set by brittle guitar and rumbling bass. Personally, I’d quite like to hear Atkinson collaborate with other instrumentalists, perhaps with a woodwind or brass player, just to bring in some different timbres and open the sound up a little — at times it comes across as very insular. Nevertheless, this is very beautiful music, and label Umor Rex are doing the world a great service by bringing it back into circulation. Recommended!
- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio
Take a piece of string, thread it through an entirely metal object (maybe a coat hanger or a wire shelf from your oven), wrap each end around your fingers, bend over forward, and, with the object hanging freely, put your fingers in your ears and gently tap the object against a hard surface.
Félicia Atkinson is a conversationalist in a world of sometimes sealed artistic enclaves. She avoids the critical staring contest, that prolonged game of theoretical wink murder, where Bourdieu’s gaze meets “the critical gaze” meets the “male gaze” meets the “artistic gaze” meets the “symbolic capital” of some other unnerving gaze. Or was that just a blink?
With all the impressions that Visions / Voices might leave on you — disorientation, joy, diverging moments of memory, escape — the one that struck me most was a feeling of creative cataclysm. The need to create. This is an album that holds a reminder deep within its core of how joyful making music and art can be, not in some deep structural quest for a eugenics of sound, but in the rewarding work of the “experimental” as a process, rather than a delineated generic other.
Although the aforementioned “Big B” might say that “a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded,” he misses the power of broken codes, of residual artistic content, of blurred disciplinary boundaries, of transgressions that engage rather than exclude, of mistakes and duff notes. This is where Félicia Atkinson shines.
For an attention to sonic detail like hers shouldn’t mean an assumption of exclusivity. Visions / Voices is inclusive yet challenging, coherent yet discursive.
But wait! There is one thing that’s exclusive about it for now; you can listen to the whole album below for the first time. Eight tracks from three years, tessellated into a stunning whole. - J Beige
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 onVisions / 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.- textura.org
Summer Eyes (2012) streaming
"French-lass-in-Belgium, Félicia Atkinson proceeds her run of fine releases from last year's 'O-Re-Gon' to 'An Age Of Wonder' as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier with the lighter contrast of 'Summer Eyes' for Morc Records. The main attraction is her longer title piece, revolving around a glowing, glassy synth hook with dissipates into etheric, breathy chamber drone with magickally tactile sensitivity. There's a comparison that's on the tip of our tongue but not refusing to come to mind, but it's safe to say this is one of Félicia's most direct and memorable compositions. The miniature 'A Sweet Thing' follows, paring down to an almost pop-wise string shimmer and purring, visceral low end tones. Fans of AFX's 'SAW II' or MSOTT should check this out." - boomkat
On Being Kind to Horses cd (Fluid Audio) (2012) streaming
A Transparent Comet (EP cooper cult) (2012) streaming
Ceremonial folk, best played loud at your local abandoned church. Monolithic piano cloaked with broken voice: fills the empty space, and summons the soul of Salinger’s Franny. - coopercultrecords.com"I first wrote about Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier almost two years ago. In the intervening period, artist Félicia Atkinson has released a wealth of material under that pseudonym and her own name. She has explored ambient soundscapes as well as more song-based material, but maintained a through-line with her own haunting voice and the conceptual rigor of her work's underlying ideas.
For her latest release-- a two-song, lathe cut 7" on Cooper Cult-- Atkinson draws on the literary legacy of J.D. Salinger (particularly the character of Franny), Salinger's effect on the women in his orbit, and the journeys and visions of radical females across time and history. This backstory foregrounds the feminist streak in Akinson's work, and listening to this latest inimitable dispatch confirms how crucial Atkinson's sound journal of her preoccupations has been to defining the contours of the tightly knit world of subterranean sound art producers.
A Transparent Comet is out soon on Cooper Cult Records. Listen to the A-Side, "Franny," below." -
adhoc.fm/
'Here’s a brand new cut from NFOP favourite Félicia Atkinson, the Paris-born artistic beauty that you may also know from JE SUIS LE PETIT CHEVALIER. Following her February release so beautifully entitled On Being Kind To Horses (an extraordinary, soul-enchanting ambient piece that could nearly fall into the same cathedral-spaced category as Tim Hecker), this new A-side below moves away from the massively altering sound and into a dark and minimal, grunge-y setting; definitely some of the “weirdest” this French goddess have provided us with so far.' - nofearofpop.net/
A river (2012) streaming
The tape commences with the spacious tones of 'Winnicott', which comprises side A. In this track, heavy, multidimensional tones pulsate, drifting soporifically over frozen fields of noise. Sometimes the tones seem inhibited as they traverse the terrain. At other times, they manifest as thick, commanding beams of elongated sound that stretch to the horizon prior to dissipating. In the last few minutes of the track, the thick tones appear somewhat removed, vibrating on the periphery and providing a contour to the more pronounced noise. The flipside is just as inviting. One of my favorite tracks is 'Willa', in which variegated, protracted tones infuse the soul with radiant energy. 'Dora' changes things up a bit with the juxtaposition of plodding tones, vibrating low ends and extended heavy tones. 'Anita' closes out the tape with dark, reverberating tones that are occasionally illuminated with warm flashes of aural energy.A River is something you will find sitting pretty on my top shelf! I highly recommend this tape. Furthermore, this release sees Space Slave illuminating the cosmos. One of the things I dig about Space Slave, aside from the wonderful sonics, is the variation in packaging and the beautiful design/artwork. Each Space Slave tape in my collection is unique. One may purchase A River directly from Space Slave!
Crystal arrows for a cosmic king cs (sangoplasmo) (2012) streaming
"I looked at the silent hills and i called the magical weapon.
In the middle of a sudden thunder it appeared to me.
Riding my faithful horse, I can now deliver the treasure to my cosmic king."
Here come a new tape from Felicia from Felicia Atkinson. From the very first sound one gets the idea of a raw nature of the whole album. The music lead us nowhere. This is obvious. Felicia tells us without any irrelevant allusions that the music is not a leader. It is a clap - a lucid and freaky clap of the nature. Our mind's games always end up with this clap. Shiny and greasy waves move around and laugh.- dumpsterdivingblog.blogspot.com
The Owls cs (wunderkammer) (2012) streaming
The Driver LP (2011) streaming
Well, at long last I have this beautiful record on my turntable. I seat in the kitchen having a cup of coffee and listen. And I am becoming aware.. of.. This amazing woman hasn't made anything like this before. Sure. Not in terms of the sound but in terms of an atmosphere. I seat in the kitchen staring at the cup of already cold coffee and listen to the silence because the side A has ended a few minutes ago. My wife turns the disc. And I am starting to become aware.. of..
Each note is a syllable or a point. Each phrase is a leader, an activist. Each paraphrase is a hidden pitfall for a romantic plot. Animals are aware of it.. And I am becoming... - dumpsterdivingblog.blogspot.com/
O-RE-GON cd (Home Normal) (2011) streaming
O-RE-GON was recorded by Felicia Atkinson in Portland, Oregon at Adam Selzer's Type Foundry Studio.The album was made in one rainy day of July 2010, when Felicia was all ready traveling for 2 months coast to coast in the United States, and recovering from a Lyme disease she caught a week before upstate New York in the deep woods east coast and that she was about to cure west coast.
The sound engeneer Adam Selzer showed Felicia all the instruments she could used, most of them she never played before: a fender rhoades, a marimba, or an harmonium, but also some she used before: a (this time) golden electric guitar and a piano: this how began this day of musical wonder.
Felicia didn't have any idea of what she wanted to play, she did not touched an instrument since two months before and wanted the tracks to be complete improvisation.
So they captured one track in the morning, Grey and green, and one track in the afternoon: Green and grey.
The music was influenced by this special state of body and mind she was in, just in the middle of being sick and , beside this event, in the middle of a wonderfull 4 month trip, and the many "ghosts" that appeared during this improvising session.
The record is also a kind of elegy to some dark and beautiful destinies that ended in troubled water: Victor Hugo's daughter Leopoldine (the lyrics of Green and Grey are a drift from one of his poems), of David Lynch's Laura Palmer and Robert Bresson's Mouchette.
vimeo.com/28573127
The Driver LP (hibernate) (2011) streaming
Atkinson was stirred to create The Driver after embarking upon a four month trip to the US last Summer. Journeying by car but unable to drive herself, she was thus free to fully appreciate the scenery and became particularly enamoured with the romantic Cascadian landscape of the Pacific Northwest which has proven so inspirational to artists and musicians for generations.Indeed, though The Driver was forged in Atkinson’s attic bedroom once she arrived home in Brussels, it is remarkable how well this record sits alongside releases from artists who reside in that part of the world, such as Marcus Fischer’s Monocoastal and Loscil’s Endless Falls. Atkinson’s visual art must surely play a key part in her songwriting as it is rare to see a musician who can conjure such strong imagery in the listener’s mind.
Opening with Half Blonde, Atkinson plays slow and deliberate guitar which is awash in reverb, found sounds adding texture to her wandering tangents. Akin to a car journey through undulating terrain, the music is pushed gently forward, rising and ebbing so slowly as to appear almost unchanging. Succeeding tracks continue this narrative and The Driver reaches apex when its title track sees Atkinson adding vocal harmony to softly strummed guitar.
The Driver is steeped in the atmosphere of the American road trip and can be considered as another faithful entry in a long line of musicians paying homage to the road. Optimistic and sunny in a manner which makes it more reminiscent of Jack Kerouac than Cormac McCarthy, this work is a faultless representation of the romance of travel and will surely stir a longing for adventure in anyone who listens. - Adam Williams Fluid Radio
Venice is Falling cs (idtn group) (2011) streaming
2011
2010
2010
2008
2008
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Dark Morse cs (shelter press) (2013) streaming
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier’s Dark Morse is an exclusive lost tape inspired by the short story The Angel Esmeralda written by Don Delillo. Following two LPs and bunch of tapes dropped last year, this new output is her most whispering beat orientated material to date.
Dark Morse is a tabu hidden at the end of a lost road in the suburbs, a pile of crawling concrete, burried under sub basses, broken rhythms, drunken lullubies for blind dogs.
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier whispers here holy encounters with dark shades moving at dawn, hoarse prayers, slum saints and never growing ghosts children….
—
» Sister Jan said, I don’t know.
Of course you know. You know. You saw her.
I don’t know what I saw.
You know. Of course you know. You saw her. »
Don Delillo, The Angel Esmeralda.
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Taxidermy of Unicorns/ Sauna Fauna (2013) streaming
"Lynn Fister’s young Watery Starve Press has already made a big splash on the cassette market, following an incredible debut compilation with releases from the likes of Stephen Molyneux and Sparkling Wide Pressure. Each tape she’s put together has arrived with individually collaged artwork, impressive and beautiful stuff all around to be certain. But this latest release is taking the imprint to a new level, so we here at the Chocolate Grinder are proud to present this quadruple premiere of videos from Taxidermy of Unicorns, a four-way split highlighting the work of female experimental artists from around the globe, including New Zealand’s Birds of Passage, Belgium’s Je Suis le Petit Chevalier, Georgia’s Motion Sickness of Time Travel, and Fister herself under her musical guise, Aloonaluna. Although each performer has a singular and unique vision here, the four sides of music are bound by some intangible common thread, giving the project a feeling that is cohesive in its blurry beauty — a phenomenon Fister discusses in a personal essay found in the companion booklet that comes with the tape. Check out the videos created by Rachel Evans, Fister, and Brian Ratigan below." - Tiny Mixtape
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, An Age Of Wonder (2012) streaming
While she's done a number of releases under her own name, JSPC came into being early in 2011 and has been haunting stereos ever since. "An Age of Wonder" is her best release yet. On "Fever Dunes," the mood is nostalgic. Simple keyboard loops float in the air around a series of minimal beats. Atkinson's vocals emerge from the mist like a beacon leading you somewhere unknown. There's a sadness in the repeating chords that pulls out fragile emotions from the deep end of the ocean.
The pieces ends with the beats picking up steam like a heart racing, eventually overcome by the darkness and left to spiral into the abyss. "The First Forest" picks up where the A-Side leaves off, though with added crunch. Hopeful notes drift out from the washed-out undercurrents of organ and guitar like a distant destination in a sullen landscape. Atkinson is reaching for the top of the mountain as the piece gets more and more oppressive. It's heartbreaking and beautiful, each note carefully considered and left to wallow in the aural murk. "An Age of Wonder" simply goes one step further in proving what a force Felicia Atkinson is. stunning work. - " Brad Rose, Experimedia
“Je suis le petit chevalier/ Avec le ciel dessus mes yeux…/ Avec la terre dessous mes pieds,” sang Nico’s son Ari on her seminal 1970 album Desertshore. Ari, who must have been all of three or four at the time, would later attempt to sell Nico’s leftover methadone at her funeral (at least according to James Young). And that juxtaposition tells you a part of what you need to know about this album (for more on parts and/as w/holes, stay tuned). Desertshore can be read as a companion to Philippe Garrel’s film La Cicatrice Intérieure, the interior scar, the closed gash — but the wound, and its healing, also represents the body’s openness to the exterior, the rejection of a paranoid and fascist boundedness and homogeneity that encompasses the fear of penetration and of leakage. The healing process speaks to resilience, but it also, ironically, cuts off the possibilities of interchange and the expansion of the subject beyond the bounds of modernist and Cartesian rationality — of Donna Haraway’s (and, speaking of the sexualized wound, Bruce LaBruce’s) “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.”
Brussels-based Félicia Atkinson, prolificist, visual artist, and sound sculptress extraordinaire, has been working as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, as well as under her own name, for some time now, but An Age Of Wonder brings her art to its pinnacle, as well as bringing to a horizon (between zenith and nadir) the reconciliating suture joining the ambient violence of recent pieces such as L’Enfant Sauvage’s “No Talisman” and Atkinson’s gentler tendencies. The press release tells us that the album is “[i]nspired by the Amish Community, the northern wisconsin sunsets and the indian summer in Belgium… filled with golden summer hazes, voluptuous thoughts, and august storms.” To the ears of this listener, however, there’s something a little darker here — more akin to the storm of Giorgione’s La Tempesta, but with our own near-decaying skyscrapers (grattacieli, an almost painful term) rearing in the background.
Speaking of ears, we might recall Marshall McLuhan’s definition of aurality and its “acoustic space”: sans center or margin, organic and integral, synaesthetic. McLuhan, in the 1960s, thought that this was the space of tribal societies in the era before the alphabet, but we might think of this state, in the present moment, as the experience of Haraway’s perverse and subversive hu-man-imal “in space… wary of holism, but needy for connection,” for visitation privileges.
Speech, for McLuhan, was an outering of the senses, and Atkinson describes her work as “being in translation, searching for an unknown meaning.” What if, in the post- or post-postmodern era, we consider the creation and distribution of sound as a speech act in itself? Atkinson, after all, identifies her process as a turning away from an immersion in media, which is also a re-turning toward a state of fiction. Will our synaesthetic senses form the healing, but not yet healed, wound-scarification in which we are retribalized, in which we may resist the tyranny of reason without a reductionist, Manichaean recourse to its Other? Goddess may be dead as well as God, and Atkinson’s music may be diversely gender-neutral as well as feminine; but with such a prophetess, initiation itself would be (alinear) progress.
While being careful with the tribal metaphor (as stock in trade of Western colonialist stereotypes), we might recall (as Atkinson herself does) the spirit animal, and with it our own animality, the fleshy aspect of our cyborg nature that should nonetheless not be considered dual; the ghost is the shell. This is a tradition that, contrary to popular stereotype, has deep roots not only for peoples who were colonized, but also in European history — in the Norse fylgja — and in our own pets, slaves of benevolence, little household deities become dependent in God’s absence. Another recent release, under Atkinson’s own name, is entitled On Being Kind To Horses; but what is a knight without spurs, a knight who is kind? A knight in white satin? There is a Medieval quality, a Germanic gothicism to this figure, and also a quality of the landscape — of a figure in a landscape — with which Atkinson’s work is very much concerned, both texturally and in her own statements and nomenclature.
But to return to our hero: When we think of the petit chevalier, the little knight, we might think not only of Nico, but also of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s much-beloved Little Prince. Like Ari’s knight, the prince finds himself with the sky in his eyes and the ground beneath his feet, but tenuously, tenuously… A proto-cyborg who was not born in the Garden, his liminality is that of the wanderer from asteroid to asteroid, of the devouring baobab, of the death inherent in seriality and repetition (both in his serial odyssey itself and in the figure of the business man) — and, ultimately, physical death itself. Here there’s a sense of ominousness or overshadowing that pervades An Age Of Wonder, somehow intertwined with a pragmatic or resigned melancholy (“Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms/ Alone and palely loitering?”)
And so onward… The two 20-minute-ish tracks that make up the album each represents internal evolutions, but never evolution as progress — that is, never evolution as Social Darwinism, the ascendance to a higher form, a human form, followed by the superhuman. No Übermenschen — instead, we remain, “material and opaque,” in the realm of the techno-primordial polar forest. Album opener “Fever Dunes” shifts from blurred vocals to insistent yet somehow twinkling chimes, a paradoxical combination of lullaby and wakeup call, before resolving into an ominous rumble and cavernous rush in the heart of which a dull, fearful electronic pulse emerges. Subsequently, Nico’s frozen warnings (“close to the frozen borderline”) and Haraway’s frozen moments, shattering, are embodied (or implanted?) in “The First Forest,” in which icy tones shift and merge into what is almost, but never quite, a lumbering metallic screech, a soughing, howling wind — baby, it’s cold inside — grating yet sensual biofeedback. There is a merging of the organic and electronic — a rejection of the organism/machine border war — that allows us to characterize An Age of Wonder as a refugium, a psychic Lost World. In another paradox, it is the Irenic colonisation of this world — the Cold War stage of the conflict over “the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination” — that is documented in Atkinson’s music.
Writing is the modal form of the document, and writing, argues Haraway, is “pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs.” But what can be documented — using this pleasurably imperfect medium-as-massage — in an online review, a double encounter and doubled mediation, a communication that is neither one-way nor interactive (“One is too few, but two are too many”)? Ari’s plaintive melody ends with the lines “J’irai te visiter/ J’irai te visiter.” An Age Of Wonder, though, is not solely a visit — the moment or duration of the encounter between subject and stranger — but a visitation. - Rowan Savage
Brussels-based Félicia Atkinson, prolificist, visual artist, and sound sculptress extraordinaire, has been working as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, as well as under her own name, for some time now, but An Age Of Wonder brings her art to its pinnacle, as well as bringing to a horizon (between zenith and nadir) the reconciliating suture joining the ambient violence of recent pieces such as L’Enfant Sauvage’s “No Talisman” and Atkinson’s gentler tendencies. The press release tells us that the album is “[i]nspired by the Amish Community, the northern wisconsin sunsets and the indian summer in Belgium… filled with golden summer hazes, voluptuous thoughts, and august storms.” To the ears of this listener, however, there’s something a little darker here — more akin to the storm of Giorgione’s La Tempesta, but with our own near-decaying skyscrapers (grattacieli, an almost painful term) rearing in the background.
Speaking of ears, we might recall Marshall McLuhan’s definition of aurality and its “acoustic space”: sans center or margin, organic and integral, synaesthetic. McLuhan, in the 1960s, thought that this was the space of tribal societies in the era before the alphabet, but we might think of this state, in the present moment, as the experience of Haraway’s perverse and subversive hu-man-imal “in space… wary of holism, but needy for connection,” for visitation privileges.
Speech, for McLuhan, was an outering of the senses, and Atkinson describes her work as “being in translation, searching for an unknown meaning.” What if, in the post- or post-postmodern era, we consider the creation and distribution of sound as a speech act in itself? Atkinson, after all, identifies her process as a turning away from an immersion in media, which is also a re-turning toward a state of fiction. Will our synaesthetic senses form the healing, but not yet healed, wound-scarification in which we are retribalized, in which we may resist the tyranny of reason without a reductionist, Manichaean recourse to its Other? Goddess may be dead as well as God, and Atkinson’s music may be diversely gender-neutral as well as feminine; but with such a prophetess, initiation itself would be (alinear) progress.
While being careful with the tribal metaphor (as stock in trade of Western colonialist stereotypes), we might recall (as Atkinson herself does) the spirit animal, and with it our own animality, the fleshy aspect of our cyborg nature that should nonetheless not be considered dual; the ghost is the shell. This is a tradition that, contrary to popular stereotype, has deep roots not only for peoples who were colonized, but also in European history — in the Norse fylgja — and in our own pets, slaves of benevolence, little household deities become dependent in God’s absence. Another recent release, under Atkinson’s own name, is entitled On Being Kind To Horses; but what is a knight without spurs, a knight who is kind? A knight in white satin? There is a Medieval quality, a Germanic gothicism to this figure, and also a quality of the landscape — of a figure in a landscape — with which Atkinson’s work is very much concerned, both texturally and in her own statements and nomenclature.
But to return to our hero: When we think of the petit chevalier, the little knight, we might think not only of Nico, but also of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s much-beloved Little Prince. Like Ari’s knight, the prince finds himself with the sky in his eyes and the ground beneath his feet, but tenuously, tenuously… A proto-cyborg who was not born in the Garden, his liminality is that of the wanderer from asteroid to asteroid, of the devouring baobab, of the death inherent in seriality and repetition (both in his serial odyssey itself and in the figure of the business man) — and, ultimately, physical death itself. Here there’s a sense of ominousness or overshadowing that pervades An Age Of Wonder, somehow intertwined with a pragmatic or resigned melancholy (“Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms/ Alone and palely loitering?”)
And so onward… The two 20-minute-ish tracks that make up the album each represents internal evolutions, but never evolution as progress — that is, never evolution as Social Darwinism, the ascendance to a higher form, a human form, followed by the superhuman. No Übermenschen — instead, we remain, “material and opaque,” in the realm of the techno-primordial polar forest. Album opener “Fever Dunes” shifts from blurred vocals to insistent yet somehow twinkling chimes, a paradoxical combination of lullaby and wakeup call, before resolving into an ominous rumble and cavernous rush in the heart of which a dull, fearful electronic pulse emerges. Subsequently, Nico’s frozen warnings (“close to the frozen borderline”) and Haraway’s frozen moments, shattering, are embodied (or implanted?) in “The First Forest,” in which icy tones shift and merge into what is almost, but never quite, a lumbering metallic screech, a soughing, howling wind — baby, it’s cold inside — grating yet sensual biofeedback. There is a merging of the organic and electronic — a rejection of the organism/machine border war — that allows us to characterize An Age of Wonder as a refugium, a psychic Lost World. In another paradox, it is the Irenic colonisation of this world — the Cold War stage of the conflict over “the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination” — that is documented in Atkinson’s music.
Writing is the modal form of the document, and writing, argues Haraway, is “pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs.” But what can be documented — using this pleasurably imperfect medium-as-massage — in an online review, a double encounter and doubled mediation, a communication that is neither one-way nor interactive (“One is too few, but two are too many”)? Ari’s plaintive melody ends with the lines “J’irai te visiter/ J’irai te visiter.” An Age Of Wonder, though, is not solely a visit — the moment or duration of the encounter between subject and stranger — but a visitation. - Rowan Savage
RACHEL EVANS (musician, Motion Sickness Of Time Travel)
Felicia Atkinson, a.k.a. Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, has been making art and music for years now; yet it seems only recently that her work has come into the limelight and stolen the hearts of our underground ears. Currently living in Brussels, Felicia’s discography has seemed to continuously multiply over the course of 2011, and on into 2012 under one alias or another, many of them on cassette tape. Her music has been released on a variety of labels including Stunned, Digitalis, No Kings, Rurualfaune, La Station Radar, I Had An Accident Records, and Aguirre to name a few. Felicia’s tape for No Kings titled Discovering Mathematics 2 was a particularly brilliant collection of pieces, and possibly one of my favorites of her work from last year (I recommend tracking it down if you’re able to). However her recent LP, L’enfant Sauvage, finds the artist taking it to the next level entirely; an enveloping irradescence surrounds the listener until all that remains is the sound. Felicia has an uncanny ability to create whole environments with sound, taking you out of your present physical state and into some other realm where the artists night visions play out before you like a picture-show in slow motion. Now Felicia is poised to release a new LP, An Age of Wonder, this March 2012 on Shelter Press (watch the promo-video for the LP here). Needless to say, this is an artist on the rise and one you should keep on your radar if you know what’s good for you.
I hadn’t been in touch with Felicia for very long, and certainly not in great depth, before asking her to do an interview. As an admirer of her music, I immediately began trying to find more information about this strange artist who seemed to so mysteriously appear out of nowhere all of a sudden in 2011. It didn’t take long before I stumbled across Felicia’s website, which just completely blew me away. Felicia is the complete package: creating in both the visual and aural dimensions. As one review so nicely put it: “Felicia… blends her music, visual art and writing into a seemingly unseparable unity … Like a truly creative mind, she doesn’t need (or want) anyone else’s music to illustrate her visions. She creates her own worlds entirely by herself, both visually and musically.” In addition to her recordings and visual art, her CV is more than impressive (to say the very least); and as if that weren’t enough icing on the cake, she’s also a writer! After following my curiosity and related questions down the rabbit hole that is the internet I was given the answers to all of my questions and more. After this doing this interview I feel as though I know Felicia so much better, and understand her music more than before. Read on as Felicia discusses her travels and family history, her philosophies on language, music and art, and you’ll be rewarded at the end with a lovely mix compiled by the artist, exclusively for the readers at Foxy D.:
1. I’ve heard that you’re a world traveler! I know you currently reside in Belgium, have had at least 1 residency in the states, and that you were originally based in France. Can you comment on the differences and similarities of recording music in various countries?
… More than traveling, I love the feeling of being a foreigner. I guess it is part of my history, my mom is polish, my grand grand father was english, I have cousins that are half togolese, other that are half german…I live in Belgium where there are 3 official languages….
I am born in Paris in 1981 where a lot of intellectuals without money immigrants could stay for cheap and learn at universities for free and find a job, and make babies there! That is the history of my parents …I guess now France has changed a lot in 30 years… A lot of people I know are leaving…chasing hope elsewhere…
Anyway, this feeling of being a stranger brings you to push your limits, because you have no habits and you have to redefine your language and what is a meaning, a thought, a gesture. For example, I write you in English, but this is not my primary language, I have to be in a state of translation. I feel like a lot of my music is inspired by this state of mind: being in translation, searching for an unknown meaning.
2. You were extremely prolific over the course of 2012. Your cassette on No Kings was my first introduction, and I’ve been gathering your releases ever since. Many of your releases have been on cassette tape. Can you give us your thoughts on the cassette format: do you prefer it over other formats and why/why not?
2011 was a blessed year for sure. It is such a nice feeling to feel supported by this small but stiring community of amazing labels, musicians and blog all over the world, it really gave me strength. Because sometimes in Brussels I feel a bit isolated and Internet helped me a lot to build bridges over the sea!
I remember when I discovered your music Rachel, I was like, wow, she is younger than me but she is my big sister: her music is close to mine and in the meantime she is so mature in her own way! I was so impressed ! I totally wanted to get in touch with you! Thank you Internet !
Back again in childhood: cassette and vinyls were what I was listening to as a kid. The magic of cassette is that you could record yourself with a cassette player, directly from the source, which I loved as a kid.
I like the size and the cost of the cassette: it is cheap and small but also precious. I believe in the preciousness of little and cheap things. Also, what is beautiful with a cassette is its track. It s like a destination inside. A cassette is a bit like a track with an invisible train inside. I like the magic of the tape itself.
But I love vinyls too. I like when music makes circles. I believe in circularity.In my latest art show in Rennes, there was a geodesic dome, cassettes, vinyls, 35 mm films, for me, all those “objects” were vehicles of circularity, of a sensation of the earth spinning. That is my vision of what is a sound.
3. You released an LP on Aguirre Records towards the end of 2011, and another vinyl effort “An Age of Wonder” will be out soon. Do you have a different approach to recording music for vinyl that you do for cassettes or other formats? If so, what’s the difference between your processes for each?
Yes for sure. L’enfant Sauvage and An Age of Wonder were conceived the same month of July 2011, the week I was going to turn 30 years old. I thought a lot about turning 30 while recording, thinking like, this will be the last recordings I’ve done in my 20s!
It is like a part 1 and part 2 of the same story. The evolution of a kind of a sound child…
It was recorded in Ohio during a residency last summer at this very cool place called Harold Arts. There was this studio run by the guys from the art residency and the sound engineer, Ben, was super calm and nice. I could basically do whatever I wanted, they would help picking the good amp, the right keyboard. The heat was unbearable but the feeling was there. And then I re-worked the tracks at home, in Brussels. And then had them mastered both by the wonderful Pete Swanson, who read my mind and added this special light he has in his way of treating sound that is so magical.
4. Can you tell us more about your new LP, “An Age of Wonder”? How is it different and/or similar from your previous LP, “L’Enfant Sauvage”?
L‘Enfant Sauvage is inspired by this movie called The Wild Child (l”enfant Sauvage ) by Francois Truffaut. It ‘s a record about wilderness and being a warrior in the sound. The label is called Aguirre, which is a movie by Werner Herzog about a lonely warrior; my bandname means ” I am the little knight” from a song from Nico and the album was The Wild Child !!!!
This record is very dark and wild I think; I thought also about the comics Black Hole by Charles Burns while doing it.
It is about this time when you want to deal with forces, when you discover power but you don’t know how to control it yet. It is about the days where you are not an adult yet.
An Age of Wonder , that will be released as a co-release on March 21 with La Station radar / Shelter Press is the second part: it is more sensual and happy in a way; it is like, I am not afraid of love, anger, power, anymore, I can play with them. I see them as shapes to sculpt and not as threads to fight. I am an adult now, with its imperfections, its wonders.
I feel also like L’enfant sauvage has no gender, whereasAn Age of Wonder is more feminine; one completes the other. Because sometimes I feel like a woman who does music, and sometimes I feel without gender. It depends I guess on what kind of action I am experimenting!
5. The French language has some obvious influences on your music, at least when it comes to titles and naming. Does that influence extend further? What other things have strongly influenced your sound and art?
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier at Le Bon Accueil, March 3, 2012
I never realized French influenced my music actually, it is just that it is my primary language, so I speak with it. I wouldn’t consider it as a use but rather as the closest language to think and express myself. But I love english too because it is so musical and so physical in the same time. For me, it’s like English is made of clay and French made of wood, each of it is necessary but doesn’t feel the same in the hand…
Many of my records and cassettes are inspired by films and books: Truffaut, Apichatpong Verasethakul, Thomas Pynchon, Shakespeare, Robert Bresson, Samuel Beckett… but actually also by tv shows like lost or twin peaks or true blood…but yes, after reading or watching a film or a TV show I often feel like playing music, like as a way to come back in this state of fiction I was into just before. It is like getting back into the game.
Recently I have been very influenced by Lloyd Kahn and the books he edited in the ’60s like Shelter. This is why the new publication house I am running as a co-pilot of Bartolome Sanson, my partner is called Shelter Press. This idea of building your own shelter, whereas it is for sleeping, for doing music or arts.
But I am also inspired by poetry for example: this book by Jerome Rothenberg Technicians of the Sacred where he collects oral poems and cosmogonies from all over the word and ages is so wonderful I love also different poets such as Paul Celan, Anna Akmatova, EE Cummings, Dylan Thomas, Marina Tsvetaieva, Vladimir Mayakovski. It is sad that poetry is so unpopular right now. It is sound too!
But also landscapes. Each trip I do has a massive influence on my music. for exemple, the redwoods we went to 2 years ago are still haunting me!
6. I know you record as Felicia Atkinson and Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. What is the difference between the music created under each name? Why did you choose to separately define a sound for each?
At one point, to know myself better, I needed a new name, like a kind of animal totem. This was where came from Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. It’s like being a werewolf. Sometimes, I need to change my skin and chant to full moon wildly! I don’t want to give any rational distinction between the two, because it is more instinctive than thought. But if I had to make a distinction I would say that my music as F.A is more horizontal where my music as JSLPC is more vertical.
7. Do you have any other aliases that you have recorded/are recording as that we should know about?
Not amymore for now. I used to have a band with my best friend called Stretchandrelax where we were playing only lying on the floor. Elise was a dancer and was doing those incredible movements with the instruments. I loved that band!
Now . I have this collab project called Riviere Amur with the wonderful Inez Lightfoot.
8. I know you’ve got at least one side project with Jackie McDowell of Inez Lightfoot, wonderfully titled Riviere Amur. Can you tell us a little more about this collaboration and how you two came to make music together, despite the distance between you? Do you have any other collab projects we should keep an eye out for?
When I discovered Inez ‘s work I was stoked, as when I discovered your music with the echos and similarities, in a good way. I was like, we need to make a band!
We are far away and of course it would be so easier to be in the same continent, but it is also nice to feel that when night comes to her place, day appear in mine and so on, we keep the light in our hands! This is the way I feel about Riviere Amur. We care about a little piece of sun we share from one ocean to another!
We just released 2 cassettes, one on I had An Accident ( a really cool label that put out one of my first cassette as jslpc, Tropical Malady) called Bois FLotte with the wonderful artwork by Ana Cabaleiro and now one with your beautiful collages on Hooker Vision.
We have new ideas on their way but I prefer to keep them secret for now…
A new collab / split album that will be out soon is a one shot project with Ensemble Economique. I added voices on his side and he added voices on my side. It will be a bit like a cosmic ping pong game record!
9. I’ve seen images and video of you in art museums, and know you’re also a visual artist as well as a sound artist. Can you tell us more about your visual art? What is the connection for you between audio and visual art?
My drawings and installations are made in the same kind of state of mind as my music…they are like calls and visions that appear to me. They happen when they miss, from their absence, their silence. There is a state of vacancy necessary for me to create. That is why I need to sleep or walk or do “nothing” sometimes, there is passivity necessary for things to happen like rain on rainbow or thunder.
My art can be seen as the possible shelter for my music, but one need the absence of the other to happen, I can’t make drawing and music in the same time. Art is more like inhaling and music as exhaling maybe. I don’t know…I can play music under a dome or a structure that I conceived but I would never draw and make music in the same time!
My drawings can be abstracts, or with characters and figures, depending of what I see in my mind. It’s a question of scale, evrything is abstract and figurative, depending on the scale you put it. They are often made on transparent paper or watercolor paper with colored inks and colored pencils.
The sculptures are made often with wood and found stuff. They are like little camps, or little geographical memorials for the mind. Sometimes they get confronted to found images that I print, or all ready existant geometrical shapes that creates a dialogue between the unseen and the archetypes that face them: a geodesic dome, an enagram, a ancestral stone would be in discussion with an abstratc watercolor, an abstrac sculpture made with pieces of wood.
10. Who are your biggest influences musically? Visually?
What is weird is that a lot of things I listen to doesn’t sound at all like what I do musically.
Most of the time I listen to folk music such as Townes van Zandt, Bert Jansch, Neil Young, Palace Brothers or Smog. A rock band like Low influenced me a lot with their threading lyrics, almost scary, sensual, violent and calm in the same time.
I feel the same adjectives when I listen to Pete Swanson or the Yellow Swans. Last night we drove with Bartolome from Brittany to Brussels, in a thunderstorm, listening to Going Places of the Yellow Swans in the car and I was again, so moved. The music was like a warm violence, a good violence, like a fire that burns and purify in the same. This record is perfect to me.
I learned a lot listening to the catalogue of labels like Root Strata, or Immune, I feel I can listen everything, because everything is coherent visually and musically, with a strong spirit. I admire so much Root Strata for their references, the thinking behind the music and images. We met Jefre Cantu and Maxwell when we went in California a year and half ago with Bartolome and also Gregg Kowalski and Marielle Jacobson. I love the work and energy of those people. They are very mature and wide thinking. I can say they are a big influence to me as musicians and as humans.
Also, as a kid, my father was listening to a lot of Indian raga music and contemporary music such as Steve Reich, Pierre Henry, John Cage or Morton Feldman, so I guess this feeling of duration and repetition influenced me…
But I am as well very excited about all those girls doing music right now such as you Rachel, or Inez Lightfoot, Grouper of course, she is the best, but also Leslie Kieffer , Stellar Om Source, Chicaloyoh, Marielle Jacobsen, Wise Blood, Pocahaunted when it was existing, Orphan fairytale, Fursaxa, Christina Carter, Julia Holter or Birds of Passage…this is great!
And to end the subject, I am also very impressed by cassette labels like NO KINGS or Sic Sic Tapes, and how every art work is so nice, and suits well as the music, like also Hooker Vision or what used to be Stunned and is still Digitalis. I love cassette labels so much!
11. What can we expect from Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier in the coming year?
Well, I don’t know yet. A few things are on their way but as soon as it is not done I prefer to keep it secret for now. Those 2 LPs on Aguirre and La Station radar / Shelter Press took me a lot of strength + my F.A and Riviere Amur Release, and this collab with Ensemble Economique…so I want to think a little bit ahead before doing a new LPs, maybe let the summer pass and gives its solar energy. I did more than 10 releases this year so want to take some time to make changes in my music, to evolve…
I want to play more live shows also. I feel I have a lot to learn in live shows. But maybe I am getting old but I feel it is hard to tour, so exhausting sometimes even if I love it! I don’t know how other people do that! I want to find a way to tour and stay healthy, like a tour where you could drink tea, eat vegetables and sleep well! I suggest people create a healthy booking agency!
I have also new drawings and sculptures in mind I am all ready working at right now.
Not forgetting to talk about Shelter Press, Bartolome’s books and records publishing house I am co-piloting. We are thinking of maybe opening a Shelter Space in Brussels…so we have to think about this ahead! and make it the best as it can be! - www.foxydigitalis.com/
Discography
2012
— A RIVER, as Félicia Atkinson, CS, Space Slave Editions (USA)
— SUMMER EYES, as Félicia Atkinson, Vinyl one side LP, Morc Tapes (BE)
— A TRANSPARENT COMET, Lathe 7′, Cooper Cult (NZ)
— A GUIDE TO THE SUN, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, SicSic Tapes (DE)
— AN AGE OF WONDER, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Vinyl LP, Shelter Press / La Station Radar (BE / FR)
— ON BEING KIND TO HORSES, as Félicia Atkinson, CD, Fluid Audio (UK)
— THE SONGLINES, as Rivier Amur, CS, Hooker Vision (USA)
— CRYSTAL ARROWS FOR A COSMIC KING, as Félicia Atkinson, CS, Sangoplasmo (PL)
— THE OWLS, as Félicia Atkinson, CS, Le Bon Accueil (FR)
— VENICE IS FALLING, as Félicia Atkinson, CS, ITDN Group (USA)
— BRIEF OBSESSIONS, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, 4 way split, 2CS, IHAA (USA)
2011
— TRAVEL EXPOP SERIE 1, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, 4 way split, Vinyl, Hands In The Dark (FR)
— BOIS FLOTTE, as Riviere Amur, CS, I Had An Accident (USA)
— L’ENFANT SAUVAGE, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Vinyl, Aguirre (BE)
— PERSEPHONE, as Félicia Atkinson, Digital, New Other Thing (USA)
— O-RE-GON, as Félicia Atkinson, CD, Home Normal (UK / JP)
— DISCOVERING MATHEMATICS 2, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, No Kings (USA)
— THE DRIVER, as Félicia Atkinson, Vinyl, Hibernate (UK)
— PANNACOTTA, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, Stunned (USA)
— A SHELTER IN BOLINAS, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, Digitalis (USA)
— LES BOIS ROUGES, as Félicia Atkinson, CS, Unread (USA)
— DAUGHTERS, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CD, La Station Radar (FR)
2010
— ORPHELIN, I’M THE LITTLE KNIGHT, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, Kaugummi (FR)
— GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CD, Ruralfaune (FR)
— TROPICAL MALADY, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, I Had An Accident (USA)
— AKHMATOVA, as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, CS, Folkwaste Library (USA)
— LAKES AND LOSSES, as Félicia Atkinson, CD, Kaugummi (FR)
2009
— A SILENT EFFORT IN THE NIGHT, as Louisville, CD, DBDS (FR)
2008
— LA LA LA, as Félicia Atkinson, CD, Spekk (JP)
— ROMAN ANGLAIS, as Félicia Atkinson with Sylvain Chauveau, CD, O’Rosa (UK)
2007
— INSTEAD OF BUYING SHOES, as Stretchandrelax, CD, Nowaki (FR)
Books:
Twenties Are Gone
2012, Shelter Press (France / Belgium)
14 x 19 cm / 54 pages / 50 copies
b/w printing on newpaper
Available (publisher website)
Sauvage
2012, Show Paper, Printed Matter, Swill Children (France)
28 x 40 cm / 16 pages / 1000 copies
b/w printing
Available (publisher website)
The Golden Age
2011, Kaugummi Books (France)
18 x 24 cm / 28 pages / 50 copies / handumbered & signed
b/w printing on 115g cyclus
Sold Out (publisher website)
Dear Volcano
2010, Kaugummi Books (France)
14 x 21 cm / 24 pages / 100 copies / handumbered
b/w printing on 115g cyclus
Sold Out (publisher website)
Dark Crystal
2010, RawRaw Edizioni (Italy)
14 x 21 cm / 24 pages / 100 copies /
b/w and color printing on 80g recycled paper and 100 g favini paper /
Sold Out (publisher website)
Dream Sequence
2009, Kaugummi Books (France)
21 x 14 cm / 28 pages / 200 copies /
color printing on 80g tracing paper and 250g silver paper
Sold Out (publisher website)
Works:
On Red Pandas
Open Studio at Rotationsatelier / OG9 Zürich (Zurich, Ch) November 2012
Visions and Voices
Solo show at Feed Space (Berlin, DE)
September 2012
Tabu
Solo show at Tokonoma (Kassel, DE)
September 2012
Mustarinda
Studio View at Mustarinda (Hyrysalmi, FI)
August 2012
Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier
Solo show at Le Bon Accueil (Rennes, FR)
January 4th – March 5th 2012
Gymnastic
Solo show at Golden Age (Chicago, USA)
July 2011
Artist Residency at QO-2 (Brussels, BE)
2010
Ghost Tropic
Solo show at Elaine Levy Project (Brussels, BE)
October 31th – November 6th 2009
Le Lac Gelé
Fable et Fragments, curated by Regis Durand,
Exposition des Félicités, Palais des Beaux Arts, Paris, 2009
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar