"An arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds"
Compelling, expansive sounds from recent collaborators (Naked Island) Felicia Atkinson & Brian Pyle - FA in another trans-Atlantic, male/female pairing (La Nuit), this time with Peter Broderick.
Where La Nuit's Road Snakes is a writhing, echoing vamp adhesively shaped around that intimate but distant voice's swerves between English & French, Ensemble Economique's From The Train Window, Red Flowers On The Mountain is all lulling wide-screen stillness - a tranquil, glowing tone poem.
Broderick on La Nuit: "after she left I treated those words as lines of an opera under which to make a ghostly string arrangement"...
Back-dated bonus tracks:
NB: artwork at top by Felicia Atkinson.
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
It's probably not my last mea culpa for an overlooked 2011 release, regrettably. Still, Felicia Atkinson's O-RE-GON (Home Normal; Spotty stream) is an indisputably great record that these ears only managed to connect with this year - & which has to be clumsily co-opted into our Festive 50 + 50...
Anyone who knows Felicia's mesmerising Aberdeen will recognise the ingredients of Green and Grey (stream in full below), O-RE-GON's jaw-dropping high point - breathy, repeating incantation, a simple, circling palette of faintly menacing texture, a hugely unsettling impact.
But where the earlier piece draws its huge power from an uncanny inhabitation of obsession, G&G's emotional range is somewhat different - less of an unfolding narrative, seemingly more directed to journeying & discovery, redemption & release.
& now her flurry of recent releases (besides O-RE-GON the past year has brought Les Bois Rouges, The Driver, Venice is Falling, Crystal arrows for a cosmic king & the compelling microKORGed loveliness of The Owls...) leads to On Being Kind to Horses. These 25 minutes of "snowy drones" for Fluid Audio take flight from a touching Mayakovsky poem.
Not sure yet that there's much (anything?) to separate the Brugges & Ostende takes on the metallic, beautifully resolved Hooves Drummed (stream both in full below). Nor what else the release contains - both these takes & one more?
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
