One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space as an instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable.

We are guided through Space as an instrument by the piano, its alinear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins – a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and miniscule, distant and immediate.

„Space As An Instrument“ by Félicia Atkinson is out as exclusive gold edition LP, black edition LP, CD and digital at Shelter Press.

Painting by Harold Ancart. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering. Lacquer cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle.