A split album as part of the GRM Portraits series bringing together two pieces by Félicia Atkinson and Richard Chartier.
"Félicia Atkinson's Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O'Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one's creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O' Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson's music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it's a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it.
Richard Chartier's music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier's music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier's music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis"
François J. Bonnet
Perpetrating the fertile collaboration initiated in 2012 with Recollection GRM, INA GRM and Shelter Press (after
Editions Mego) offer the Portraits GRM complementary series, no longer focused on the "classic" GRM repertoire but towards recent creations commissioned by the GRM to artists from all horizons. Under the aegis of
François J. Bonnet, the Portraits GRM series focuses on important and emerging figures of the experimental music scene and highlights the notion of work rather than album. By reaffirming the concept of musical work, the Portraits GRM series seeks to renew with the pioneering work that the GRM Collection series but also the Philips Prospective 21e Siècle collection had achieved so admirably: offer a panorama of current musical experimentations and embrace a more durable scope with works that manage to extract themselves from an increasingly tyrannical and increasingly hazardous present-time. At a time when nothing knows how to "leave a mark", this series aims to address both current listeners, and explorers of the future. Many releases in the collection are contemporary works by two different musicians, each piece taking up the space of one side. Longer works however, fill an entire record.
Experimental musician, sound and visual artist Félicia Atkinson (born 1981) lives on the wild coast of Normandy (France). She has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on
Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson.
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don't speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character's tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist.
Félicia Atkinson has collaborated with musicians including
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Chris Watson, Christina Vantzou, and
Stephen O'Malley, and with ensembles including Eklekto (Geneva) and Neon (Oslo). She has performed at venues and festivals including INA GRM/Maison de la Radio and the Philharmonie (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), the Barbican Center (London), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Atonal (Berlin), Henie Onstad (Oslo), Unsound (Krakow), and Skanu Mesz (Riga). Her work has been commissioned by filmmakers (
Ben Rivers, Chivas de Vinck) and fashion houses (Prada, Burberry). She has exhibited in museums, galleries, and biennials including RIBOCA Biennale (Riga), Overgaden (Copenhagen), BOZAR (Brussels), Espace Paul Ricard (Paris), and MUCA ROMA (Mexico City).
Richard Chartier (born 1971) is a Los Angeles based sound artist / composer considered one of the key figures in minimalist sound art. Chartier's works explore the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself.
His works have been published since 1998 on
Room40,
Editions Mego,
Important Records, Ash International /
Touch, mAtter, Raster-Noton, Spekk, Trente Oiseaux, NVO, Farmacia901, 12k, and his own imprint LINE.
He has collaborated with William Basinski, ELEH,
France Jobin, Robert Curgenven,
Taylor Deupree, AGF, CoH, and Yann Novak,
Asmus Tietchens... In installation form, he has created works with multimedia artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, visual artist Linn Meyers, and projected light artist Anthony McCall. Under his guise Pinkcourtesyphone, an ambient project restarted in 2012, he has collaborated with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Kid Congo Powers, harpist Gwyneth Wentink, AGF, and thereminist Evelina Domnitch.
