Félicia Atkinson

Félicia Atkinson has been making music since the early 2000s, and has released a number of albums and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. She will be presenting a version adapted for the stage (electroacoustic tape, improvised vocals and keyboard) of her new album, Space As An Instrument, released on Shelter Press in October 2024, inspired in particular by Olivier Remaud’s philosophical essay Penser comme un iceberg (Actes Sud 2022).

For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit a certain ecology alongside, and within, many other things that do not speak: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas…

The French electroacoustic composer and visual artist creates plastic and sound works that animate these other possible voices in conversation with her own, combining field recordings, MIDI instruments and poetic extracts in French and English, fabric installations, drawing on paper and canvas, and clay sculptures.

‘In her new album, Space As An Instrument, the composer and visual artist sets out to explore the banality of the rustling of the universe through a seemingly minimalist and diaphanous orchestration (piano notes, synth strings, field recording and whispered words), but which is inordinately maximalist in the way it captures the infinitely large and the infinitely small.
The result is a feeling that the musician, by making the cosmos vibrate, is calling for a great empathetic and ecological awakening, in a world where the survival of the human race will depend on its determination to want to cohabit with the forces that go beyond the horizon of its immediate gaze’.
François Moreau Les Inrockuptibles, 2024