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Félicia Atkinson

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Félicia Atkinson, “Image Langage” (Shelter Press, 2022)

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This latest album from the consistently fascinating Atkinson is yet another plunge into a vibrantly textured and otherworldly dreamspace, this time drawing inspiration from an abstract dialog between house and landscape. Or more specifically, “Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world.” In keeping with that theme, Atkinson “revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work.” Naturally, there are some other conceptual layers as well (this being a Félicia Atkinson album, after all). One of the more interesting ones is the decision to give the album a name that resembles a “fake title of a fake Godard film.” 

In an obvious sense, that is apt given how Image Langage feels like a film with no actual images, but Godard’s mischievous meaning-dissolving weirdness is also manifested in how Atkinson wields and repurposes her sounds. In more concrete terms, that means that Atkinson deliberately used instruments alternately like field recordings or characters in a murky, surreal narrative and often reduces her voice to an unpredictably drifting and elusive presence. The overall effect is like being lost in a beautiful dream where an unreliable narrator periodically drifts in with riddle-like non-clues that only lead me deeper into Atkinson’s eerie, soft-focus enigma.

This album is billed as “an environmental record” about “getting lost in places imagined and real.” Naturally, one of the real places central to the album is Atkinson’s home on the “wild coast of Normandy” where much of the writing and recording took place (the rest occurred at a lakeside residency in Switzerland). I bring all this up because Image Langage has an unusually enigmatic and slippery aesthetic that blurs the line between songcraft and more abstract/outré fare. At times, the album can feel very “ambient,” but it is actually chasing something akin to impressionistic clairvoyance/clairaudience. While fully grasping the shades of meaning lurking within a Félicia Atkinson is often a tall order, Thea Ballard crafted quite an illuminating statement for the album’s description, noting that Image Langage evokes a visit to Atkinson’s seaside home in which we are “invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred.” 

In more practical terms, that means that the overall impression left by Image Langage is that of staying in a benignly haunted cottage populated by whispered voices, bleary drones, ephemeral flickers of piano melody, and hallucinatory manipulations of nature sounds. Unsurprisingly, I find that to be characteristically immersive and fascinating Atkinson territory, but Image Langage also has a handful of great individual pieces that transcend the baseline “ASMR-inspired ambient for well-read seaside ghosts” aesthetic. Amusingly, a case could be made that this is Atkinson’s “dub album,” as two of the strongest pieces share some common ground with artists like Pole and loscil.

My favorite piece is the album’s single, “Becoming A Stone,” which features a hushed monologue (“I believe that a fence will keep animals out, just outside the kitchen window”) weightlessly drifting over a quiet bed of clicks, pops, a lazily repeating chord, and a wandering, bleary melody. Elsewhere, the more structured “The House That Agnes Built” is the loscil-esque piece, as Atkinson sensuously whispers over billowing, deconstructed dub centered around a sonar-like ping. Those subtle dub techno elements suit Atkinson’s aesthetic quite well, but there are a couple of drone-based pieces that are similarly strong. 

In particular, “The Lake is Speaking” is classic Atkinson, as it feels like a wandering piano melody is guiding me through a harmonically rich labyrinth of undulating dream drones. The title piece is yet another highlight, as hushed overlapping/doubled voices languorously bubble up from an uneasy backdrop of flute and/or harmonium drones. It all adds up to yet another wonderfully sublime album from a consistently compelling and endlessly evolving artist on a path entirely her own. Image Langage feels like getting a glimpse of someone’s most intimate journals, but only after an erasure poet got there first, leaving behind only a series of maddeningly enticing decontextualized fragments and a lingering sense of a beautiful mystery destined to remain forever unsolved.

Listen here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “Everything Evaporate” (Shelter Press, 2020)

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This latest release from F√©licia Atkinson is ostensibly a minor and somewhat transitional one, as it is a cassette intended as a sort of culminating document of a year spent traveling and performing. As with all recent Atkinson releases, however, the reality is far more complex, enigmatic, and deeply conceptual than anything that can be easily summarized in just one sentence. 

Partly inspired by the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and partly intended as “a reassessed document of public performance with improvised studio interventions acting to break the linear stream of the live-on-stage temporality,” Everything Evaporate is an intriguing and sophisticated release that seems to exist at the borderline of form and dreamlike abstraction. As such, it is not the optimal entry point for the curious (that would be 2019’s The Flower and the Vessel), but deep listening reveals this release to be every bit as absorbing as the rest of Atkinson’s recent hot streak.

For the most part, Everything Evaporate is an remarkably apt title for this release, as several of these songs sound like they are heeding that command in real-time. On the opening title piece, however, Atkinson largely picks up exactly where she left off with The Flower and the Vessel. Granted, it is a bit more minimal than usual, as Atkinson’s breathy monologue unfolds over an oscillating and gently heaving bed of droning bass tones.Her seductively accented voice remains sharply in focus though, so the heart of the piece is an mysterious, poetic, and evocative spoken word performance.

At this stage in her career, Atkinson’s ASMR-influenced narratives are very much the strongest and most instantly recognizable feature of her work, as she manages to make even mundane phrases like “can I get a cup of coffee please?” seem pregnant with deep hidden meaning. While her voice is unquestionably the center of everything, however, there are plenty of unpredictable other factors driving and shaping Atkinson’s recent work, as she seems to draw a significant amount of inspiration from both literature and visual art.

Characteristically, those “outside” influences rarely manifest themselves in expected or conventional ways. The following instrumental “I can’t stop thinking about it” is a prime example of how those disparate threads converge, as Atkinson conjures up a surreal miasma of plinking marimbas, chirping birds, and spectral drones. At first, it all feels like a lazily clinking, disjointed, and formless haze, but the drones sneakily increase in richness and intensity for a shimmering and dreamlike crescendo. 

Notably, that piece also contains an excerpted fragment of a Helen Frankenthaler interview that recounts how she ruined a painting by messing with its fragile ambiguity. While that recording makes up a very small part of the album, its sentiment seems to be the guiding force at the heart of Everything Evaporate. I suspect Atkinson was being quite sincere when she titled the piece “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

The next piece, “Transparent, in movement,” continues to explore that same hazy, impressionistic, and erratically plinking aesthetic, but Atkinson’s voice returns for another cryptic monologue and the piece gradually converges into a slow, stumbling rhythm of sorts. Naturally, that alone is enough to make it a stronger piece. However, that is arguably just the piece’s backbone, as a hallucinatory swirl of peripheral sounds blossoms outwards as the piece progresses towards an eerie finale of darkly twinkling piano.

The following “Don’t Assume” opens as yet another spectral haze of blurred drones and disjointed marimba plinks, but they are bolstered by an ascending roar of more visceral, metallic tones this time around. The piece admittedly takes a while to catch fire, yet it is worth the wait, as it eventually opens up into a genuinely creepy crescendo of overlapping, pitch-shifted voices and snatches of sinister-sounding sing-song melody.

It feels like I am eavesdropping on a group of dead-eyed, possessed children joining together for either an occult incantation or a distracted performance of a macabre nursery rhyme. That late-album descent into darker territory continues into the closing (and ominously titled) “This is the gate,” as an insistent harp-like chord obsessively repeats over a phantasmagoric mélange of floating feedback-like tones and murky smears of metallic chimes. Gradually, form emerges as rippling piano arpeggios overlap and the underlying metallic shimmer converges into a loose pulse of sorts. By the final moments, it actually blossoms into something quite beautiful as Atkinson’s buried voice murmurs beneath some tender, lingering chords and a warm, all-enveloping hiss.

Those final two pieces are my favorite ones on the album and rank among some of Atkinson’s finest work, particularly “Don’t Assume.” That said, “This is the gate” is probably Everything Evaporate‘s most radical creative breakthrough—or at least the most successful incarnation of the aesthetic evolution that runs throughout much of the album. 

More than any other piece, “This is the gate” evokes an absorbing and gently hallucinatory state of suspended animation, as Atkinson creates the illusion that all of the instrumentation is floating, decontextualized, and untethered to any structure. Then, she begins subtly sliding each piece into place until her lazily lingering tones converge into a warm web of rippling harmonies engulfed in a comforting sea of hiss.

That is not a far cry from what happens elsewhere on the album, however, as the biggest difference is only that other songs achieve a similar sleight of hand by transforming disjointed percussive instruments into richly layered drones. As a result, Everything Evaporate is an especially rewarding album for focused listening, as it is a delight to hear Atkinson pull metaphorical rabbit after rabbit out of her hat, subtly and surreptitiously transforming her hyper-minimal palette of misused marimbas and a voice into pieces of impressive depth and mystery.

Samples can be found here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “The Flower And The Vessel” (Shelter Press, 2019)

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This latest album was composed and recorded in “impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities” as Atkinson ambitiously toured the world while pregnant, making plenty of field recordings in far-flung locales like Tasmania and the Mojave Desert along the way. I am not surprised that those conditions were particularly amenable for her hushed, dreamlike, and ASMR-inspired vocal work, but I did not expect the underlying music to be quite as fleshed-out and hauntingly lovely as this. 

While Atkinson cites both Japanese flower arrangement and childhood memories of French impressionist composers as significant influences, her elegantly fragmented and floating reveries are uniquely and distinctively her own. I do wonder if the Ikebana influence was the final missing puzzle piece for Atkinson’s artistic vision though, as The Flower And The Vessel strikes me as her strongest release to date. Her aesthetic has not changed all that much (nor would I want it to), but her intuitions for focus, clarity, and balance have definitely become stronger and more unerring.

As befits an album quietly recorded with minimal equipment in hotel rooms, The Flower And The Vessel opens in subdued, enigmatic, and blearily soft-focus fashion. After a brief introduction (“L’Après-Midi“) that is essentially just Atkinson’s murmuring and whispering voice, the album begins in earnest with the shivering drones and rippling melancholy piano arpeggios of “Moderato Cantabile.” It is quite a lovely and tender piece, but the lion’s share of Atkinson’s artistry is devoted to the textures and dynamics, as floating and swelling tones alternately crackle, sensuously throb, or hang in the air like a warm mist. 

It is not until the third piece (“Shirley to Shirley”), however, that the album truly catches fire. Musically, “Shirley” is an elegantly blurred and simmering bit of slow-motion psychedelia, as a languorous swirl of field recordings and synths floats above a lazily fluid bass line. The best part is the vocals though, as Atkinson shares a cryptic and confessional-sounding monologue that is multitracked and processed to sound eerily supernatural. From that point onward, The Flower And the Vessel blossoms into quite a quietly stunning album, as even a simple piece like “Un Ovale Vert” is a rapturous reverie of overlapping ripples and submerged snatches of evocative field recordings.

While “Shirley to Shirley” is never quite unseated as the release’s high-water mark, the second half of the album shows Atkinson to be an absolute sorceress at wielding slow-building tension and conjuring wonderfully disorienting and hallucinatory scenes. “You Have To Have Eyes” is an especially striking and mesmerizing example of Atkinson’s unique and creepy mystique, as her whispered monologue slowly builds to a dense web of buzzing textures, obsessively repeating loops, and snippets of a truly haunting child-like voice.It is a beguilingly fragile, intimate, and lovely piece that also makes me feel like I am about to be murdered by a demonic doll in an abandoned orphanage. 

Atkinson gamely allows those sinister shadows to deepen further with the murky and pointillist “Linguistics Of Atoms,” but the gently dreamlike “Lush” steers the arc back towards beauty and human warmth, resembling a hypnotic and ritualistic gamelan performance under a starry desert sky. I quite like Atkinson’s “ASMR-damaged Fourth World dreamscape” aesthetic and it surfaces a few more times before the album ends, but the two pieces that diverge from it a bit are more noteworthy. 

The best is the achingly lovely and gently swaying “Joan,” as a gorgeously woozy and wobbly organ theme slowly emerges from the quavering thrum of the opening collage (the chattering birds are a nice touch too). Atkinson’s bleary and beautiful organ melodies return once more for the closing epic “Des Pierres,” but it does not linger in sensuous, quavering warmth forever, as guest Stephen O’Malley helps build the piece to a roiling crescendo of pulsing guitar noise.

While it admittedly takes a few songs before The Flower And The Vessel begins to make a deep impression, it definitely makes one, as Atkinson pulled together quite a strikingly beautiful and seductively hallucinatory batch of songs. “Shirley to Shirley” easily ranks among the finest pieces that Atkinson has ever recorded, but almost all of her recent albums have had least one rapturously sublime centerpiece. The difference with this one is merely that the gulf between “Shirley” and the surrounding material it is not a wide one at all: several of the songs on the last half of the album would have easily been stand-out pieces on any previous release. That said, they belong here and here alone. 

While the consistently high level of quality is a delight, The Flower And The Vessel is quite an impressive work as a focused, compelling, and immersive whole as well. The appeal transcends music, as it is closer to a hypnagogic, impressionistic travelogue of remote locales shared with quiet, tender intimacy. The Flower And The Vessel is Atkinson’s defining masterpiece (and probably the single most beautiful and effective embodiment of the Shelter Press aesthetic as well). I love this album.

Samples can be found here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “Hand in Hand” (Shelter Press, 2017)

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Félicia Atkinson’s radical artistic transformation over the last several years has been quite an interesting one, as each new release seems to distance her further and further from her excellent work as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier and into much stranger and more challenging territory. With her last major statement, 2015’s A Readymade Ceremony, Atkinson shifted the focus away from music towards a strong emphasis on whispered spoken-word performance of repurposed found texts mingled with George Bataille and her own poetry. 

Hand in Hand goes still further in that direction, often reducing the accompanying music to an absolute minimum to focus almost entirely on an eclectic and evocative array of hushed readings from old plant books, magazines, JG Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and her own writings. The overall effect is often wonderfully surreal and intimate, but Atkinson’s hyper constrained and minimal palette does not offer enough melodicism or dynamic variety to quite carry a full album. A few of the individual pieces, however, are quite mesmerizing (particularly the closing “No Fear But Anticipation”).

The album opens in lovely (if deceptive) fashion with the subtly smeared psychedelia of “I’m Following You,” a woozy reverie for Fender Rhodes organ. For better or worse, that is Atkinson’s sole foray into conventional melodicism on Hand in Hand, a decision that will never stop perplexing me given her oft-stellar past work as a multi-instrumentalist. 

Intellectually, of course, I get it: during the prime of the first phase of her career, Atkinson was one of the most compelling voices in the cassette underground, but she fit very comfortably within that milieu. With her more recent work, she has forged a much more divergent path that is very much her own. That is certainly gutsy and inspired, but I wish the break with her past had not been quite so decisive sometimes, as it is like watching a great boxer fight with one of his arms tied behind his back. 

Initially, however, Atkinson’s radical minimalism serves her fairly well in the Phillip K. Dick-inspired “VALIS,” as the overlapping, French-accented voices of her breathy and sensuously whispered monologue feel increasingly disconcerting and inhuman as an undercurrent of noise-damaged and insectoid textures swells below. While she never attempts anything quite as gauche as singing, Atkinson is admittedly quite skilled at using her voice as an instrument, managing to imbue even the most mundane passages with magnetic intensity and mystery while subtly employing effects to add a patina of hissing, out-of-focus unreality.

The following “Curious in Epidavros” unveils still more of the album’s recurring themes, namely a sort of plinking, hollow metal percussion and a blurting, squiggling arsenal of modular synth textures. Variations on those two elements surface quite a lot in the following songs, which is a very disorienting and counterintuitive aesthetic indeed: half primitive home-made marimba, half retro-futurist space music. Naturally, such a strange blend of the ancient and the future leads to some interesting directions, such as the broken, shuddering, and wobbly dub-techno of “Adaptation Assez Facile” or the druggy bass slide and clattering ping-pong ball soundscape of “Monstera Deliciosa.” 

The downside is that many pieces feel like brief, sketch-like experiments rather than fully formed ideas. One notable exception to that trend, however, is “Visnaga,” as the hollow plinking percussion feels like a dull, broken bell resonating through the eerie streets of a deserted town and the strangled, sputtering synth flourishes only deepen the air of menace and desolation. 

Atkinson’s hushed and fraught vocals seem especially unsettling and confessional, which is an impressive testament to the perverse genius of her art, as the text merely extols the virtues of a desert plant. Elsewhere, “A House A Dance A Poem” reprises the deeply broken and warped dub of “Adaptation,” tweaking the formula with a buried transmission of chopped, stammering vocal snippets and an invasive, random-sounding high-hat that feels like a grotesque parody of dance music.

Aside from “Visnaga,” the unquestionable zenith of Hand in Hand is saved for the final piece (the aforementioned “No Fear But Anticipation”). For one, it is quite a bit sexier than the rest of the album, as Atkinson ruminates on the nature of desire. More importantly, she does so over a sensuous and understated groove that offers some rare glimpses of non-subverted chords, melodies, and rhythm. That alone would be enough to make it the album highlight, but it goes still further to build to a wonderful outro of wildly chirping synth jabbering. 

Aside from that, Hand in Hand is mostly a curiously challenging, uneasy, and chance-influenced affair that bears little resemblance at all to any of Atkinson’s peers in the contemporary experimental music scene. ¬†That gulf would almost be wide enough to make Atkinson seem like a hermetic autodidact/outsider artist, but she actually does seem to be part of an established movement: she just happened to be born at the wrong time, as her passion for found text, unconventional tools, and bizarre juxtapositions would have made her very much welcome in the Surrealist/Dada milieu or the ’60s/’70s avant-garde that birthed so many of her current influences (Robert Ashley, Joan La Barbara, etc.). 

She certainly seems to share that generation’s revolutionary/”anything is possible” mindset, gamely blurring the boundaries between poetry, cut-ups, performance art, conceptual art, and music and even transforming this album into a 7-hour “environmental audiobook” for an exhibition in Rennes. Such ambition and adventurousness certainly do not always translate into accessible music, but the same is true for folks like Stockhausen and John Cage either and current artists are still regularly inspired by those guys. While Hand in Hand is not my favorite Félicia Atkinson album, it is definitely one of her most bold and admirable releases to date, as she is tirelessly straining at the bounds of sound art rather than making any attempt to play it safe. When she succeeds, the results can be quite striking.

Listen here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “A Readymade Ceremony” (Shelter Press, 2015)

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I have historically not followed Félicia Atkinson’s prolific career too closely, aside from enjoying the excellent Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier album on Aguirre, but this latest experiment in surrealism/dada/collage/detournement piqued my interest. For one, it is billed as a “concrète/post-digital oratorio in five parts” and was made in willfully constrained/minimalist fashion using only a laptop with limited software (Atkinson has previously sounded like a one-woman psych-rock band). 

Also, it was partially inspired by being frightened as a child by Pierre Henry’s “Apocalypse de Jean” and is built upon texts ranging from George Bataille’s erotic prose to Atkinson’s own writings to snippets from random Italian art magazines. To me, that either sounds like a recipe for a pretentious towering fiasco or a goddamn masterpiece, but the end result is mostly neither, though one piece (“L’Oeil”) does manage to veer quite close to the latter.

The album kicks off with “Against Archives,” which is built upon an insistent electronic throb beneath a haze of eerie whines and deeply submerged, barely-there chord swells. Then, somewhere past the halfway point, the piece downshifts into just a deep bass pulse and a very industrial-sounding high-hat and Atkinson begins softly, tunelessly, and distractedly singing lyrics like “I’m a sister, I’m a lover” like someone who has no idea that they are being recorded. 

The following “L’Oeil” plunges even further into electronic noise territory, but there is a very appealing push-and-pull between Atkinson’s gnarled, crunching white noise waves and snatches of some distant, beautiful piano music. More importantly, Atkinson’s vocals are very prominent, sounding like a very intimate, hushed, and hurried confessional that seems at least partially culled from Bataille’s “Madame Edwarda.” It also feels simultaneously erotic and macabre (there is a repeating line about hanging from a shower curtain rod), but apparently chronicles a conversation with a sweater, which is an amusingly wry bit of deception.

The shorter “The Book is the Territory” departs somewhat from noise to drift into some blearily shimmering Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier-style psychedelia, but also throws some disorientingly dramatic synths and heavy electronic textures into the mix as well. Unusually, Felicia’s vocals are nowhere to be found until they slowly emerge from the murk near the end, panning around to unexpectedly share some kind of powerful, difficult-to-decipher heartache. The completely instrumental “Carve the Concept and the Artichoke” then plunges into murky and warped dark ambient territory before suddenly giving way to a discordantly played solo piano and a disjointed drum beat amidst some very evil-sounding breathing and dripping sounds. 

The closing “Recherche De La Base Et Du Sommet” initially seems like it is going reprise quite a similar formula, but then abruptly transforms into a howling gale of hisses, moans, and metallic grinding as Felicia begins her reading Rene Char’s poem of the same name (or some cut-up variation of it, as I do not understand French). Then the piece dissolves into cavernous moans and snarls of noise and Atkinson sets down her microphone and begins loudly crumpling up paper amidst all the chaos, which is an appropriately weird end for a deeply weird album.

For the most part, I enjoyed A Readymade Ceremony quite a bit, but there are a number of elements to it that I find perplexing or exasperating (and not in a “this art is too challenging for me to comprehend” way). For one, the album is ostensibly a significant divergence for Atkinson due to its text-based nature, but I found her abandonment of conventional instrumentation to be equally radical. Notably, she had previously staked-out some very appealing territory for herself as a purveyor of warmly hallucinatory instrumental reveries, which would have provided a great backdrop for this experiment. 

It seems regressive to completely abandon an entire successful aesthetic in favor of becoming a better-than-average texture-centric laptop noise artist, though Atkinson’s colder and more menacing backdrop admittedly serves her quite well in “L’Oeil.” My other issue is that much of Atkinson’s text-collage alchemy—the album’s raison d’être—was lost on me, either reduced to only a few understandable phrases or spoken in a language that I do not understand. Granted, not knowing French is my problem, but it is worth noting that listeners need to be at least bi-lingual to fully unravel A Readymade Ceremony‘s mysteries.

Thankfully, Atkinson’s voice still can be very effective even when the specific content is lost and its alternately sensual, conspiratorial, and vulnerable presence is a very effective counterbalance to the largely inhuman musical backdrop. It is not a complete success though. At its worst, A Readymade Ceremony sounds like a decent noise album or installation piece, which is a definite downgrade from Atkinson’s past high points. “L’Oeil,” however, is inarguably ten minutes of uniquely haunting inspiration though and “The Book is the Territory” is not terribly far behind, which means that A Readymade Ceremony is at least half of an absolute triumph despite all of my grumbling.

Listen here.

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Naked Island (Peak Oil, 2017)

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This is the debut effort from the duo of Ensemble Economique’s tirelessly prolific Brian Pyle and Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier’s Félicia Atkinson and it is a great one. Consisting of two very different long-form pieces, Naked Island offers up a beguiling and hallucinatory mélange of breathy spoken word, dreamy synth drones, clattering percussion workouts, blown-out shoegaze bliss, and spacey abstraction.

The first side of this record is consumed by the ambitiously titled “Deep, Transcendent Waves of Golden Light,” which opens in a dreamlike reverie, as Atkinson whispers in French over a bed of retro-futurist synth drones. Gradually, however, a muted techno thump fades in and the piece begins to cohere into something more structured and propulsive. 

In a general sense, “Waves” has a lot in common with Pyle’s recent Ensemble Economique work, as the sizzling, spacey swells are soon bolstered by lush, Romantic, and goth-y synth chords, hallucinatory studio tweaking, and some buried, yet tormented, guitar-like moans. As much as I enjoy all of that stuff normally, it is presented in a much more effective way on this album than it has been on some of Pyle’s solo works. I have no idea if Atkinson is responsible for the wise addition of the lively, thumping pulse, but her sensuous vocals are most definitely a welcome addition to Pyle’s bleary, melancholy strain of psychedelia.

The album’s second side is similarly excellent, as “Play it as it Lays” is built upon a wonderfully clattering and dynamic drum beat that is a strong enough hook to carry the entire piece by itself. Perhaps realizing this, Pyle and Atkinson opted for far more amorphous/vaporous musical accompaniment this time around, dispensing with words or any kind of prominent chord progression. Instead, the duo embellish their rolling percussion with a shifting organ drone, hazy swells of wordless vocals, and a shimmering nimbus of peripheral mindfuckery. Gradually, however, the drums are overtaken by the accumulating washes of burbling and shimmering synths and floating vocals, leading to a lovely and vibrant coda of shapeless, oceanic bliss and buried, roiling noise.

The sole criticism that I can muster is that Naked Island sounds a lot more like a great Ensemble Economique album than something completely new and different, though I am perfectly fine with that state of affairs. Aside from her vocals on “Deep, Transcendent Waves,” it is difficult to tell exactly where Atkinson’s influence manifests itself, as her solo work is primarily a somewhat chameleonic strain of layered, phantasmagoric experimentalism. 

It is probably safe to say that her presence is responsible for the heightened druggy weirdness swirling around the more structured bits, but whatever she did seems to have brought out the best in both her and Pyle. For one, both pieces are beautifully constructed compositions that maintain a pleasant momentum and achieve a satisfying dynamic arc. Secondly, this album is an unusually warm and human one, as far as fringe-y abstract experimentalism goes. I am not sure if I would state that Naked Island is definitely a career zenith for either Pyle or Atkinson, but a strong case could certainly be made, as this is an absolutely essential release for fans of either.

Listen here.