Geographic North – GN49
Félicia Atkinson is a composer, sculptor, painter, poet, and publisher
from Rennes, France. Atkinson has led a fruitfully fantastic run of
eerily blissful, serenely euphoric sounds. Whether under her own name or
via her defunct recording pseudonym Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier,
Atkinson has released work on Umor Rex, Digitalis Limited, Aguirre, and
Shelter Press, an imprint co-run with Bartolomé Sanson.
‘Coyotes’ is an EP inspired by Atkinson’s last voyage to New Mexico in
February 2017, when she visited and took in the geographic landscapes
from Taos to Ghost Ranch. The same vistas also inspired much of Agnes
Martin’s and Georgia O’Keefe’s painting, as well as Jerome Rothenberg’s
poetry and translation’s works.
Atkinson describes a ‘Coyotes’ as a “Carnet de Voyage,” a tape you could
directly play in your car while traveling somewhere, a kind of
imaginary map to a sentimental journey. A spontaneous gesture, close to
the notion of gift or offering. Or, simply, a postcard to a friend.” But
it’s also a praise to the conservation of national and state parks and
its human and non-human souls, menaced as we know now by drilling and
violent economic speculations.
Here, coyotes act as a kind of metaphor of ambiguity and doubt, a state
of mind that Atkinson find interesting to transcribe musically; the
ambiguity furthered by Atkinson as a literal “foreigner” in New Mexico.
She conveys a sense of visiting these native sacred lands and wondering
what you are doing there.
Musically, ‘Coyotes’ is composed of two long tracks, “Abiqiu” and
“Lighter Than Aluminium.” Each track features an effervescent froth of
piano, midi sounds evokes marimbas, Fender Rhodes, bells, sub-basses,
and spoken word poetry written by the musician to display a melancholic
landscape made of transparent but deep layers of pale colors and blurry
lines.
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