Felicia Atkinson - Sans Visage - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Music and art of the 17th and 18th century offers a range of contrasts and colors. It is filled with impressive ostentation and ornaments that contrast with humbleness and simplicity. Attempts to engage human emotions and InchattackInch them as well as the intention to capture individual emotions and passions are evident in every composition. Every country brings it's own cultural heritage related to the language, traditions, and unique culture of it's people who have been building it for generations. On this album Martin Hroch presents works by French, Italian, and Czech composers. Martin Hroch, a prominent Czech harpsichordist, studied at Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno. He studied under the harpsichordist B.M. Willi and pianists A. Vlasakova and J. Jirasky. He continued his studies of harpsichord and early music at Hochschule fur Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. As a soloist and chamber musician he performs with many orchestras and chamber ensembles in the Czech Republic and across Europe. He records for broadcasting and television companies, and is a member of the British Harpsichord Society. He currently serves as a teacher at JAMU in Brno.

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms - how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as Incha record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.Inch Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself InchWhat am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?Inch The answer gradually revealed itself InchWith small gestures recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody.Inch In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and cu

Statement - Score [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/13/2004