Félicia Atkinson: Space As An Instrument

An in-depth interview with the French artist-composer

Writing about Félicia Atkinson’s music, it seems nobody can resist likening her whispered vocals to ASMR.

Since the late 2000s, the French musician and visual artist has been releasing collages of field recordings, midi instrumentation and her own hushed vocals, performing abstract poems and stories – in her native French and in English – over ambient clouds of sound.

Atkinson grew up in Paris, but these days she lives in rural Normandy with her husband, Bartolomé Sanson, with whom she’s been running the independent publishing house Shelter Press since 2012, and their child. The label has not just released her own records, but also those of other idiosyncratic artists like Claire Rousay, Jules Reidy, Lisa Lerkenfeldt and James Rushford.

Atkinson is an avid collaborator; she has recorded several albums with experimental musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and has worked with Stephen O’Malley and Christina Vantzou. Her musical and visual work landed in all the right places, from the most forward-thinking festivals to exhibitions, filmmakers, even fashion houses.

The ASMR comparison is not wrong, but it reduces her music to an unsubstantial aspect. Much more startling is Atkinson’s ability to craft vivid emotional landscapes of sound and poetry, always evoking strong imagery and creating a distinct atmosphere.

Her most recent record, Space As An Instrument, comes equipped with everything a great Félicia Atkinson album needs. It’s been in my life for a few weeks now, and it surely qualifies as another outstanding entry in her deep catalogue.

I spoke to Atkinson at length about her upbringing, her 15-year career as a woman experimental musician, and of course, her newest work.

What are some of your earliest memories of sound?

I often connect my first memory of sound to summer vacations in Poland when I was a small kid. We would stay at my aunt’s one-bedroom in Warsaw for a few days before going to the countryside to my grandma’s house. In the early mornings, while still half asleep, I would be listening to my mom and her sister hushing in Polish. I remember loving the sound of hushing in a language I could not completely understand.

Did you grow up in a musical household and get music education?

My parents didn’t play any instruments, but they listened to music all the time. My dad was a psychiatric nurse and my mom, who escaped the Soviet regime in Poland in 1968, worked as a librarian at the French National Library. They came from a working class upbringing and were very keen on sharing their love of culture with me. To them, it was the path to social emancipation; culture was all that mattered.

I grew up in a tiny apartment [in Paris], and then we moved to a bigger one in a state-owned gigantic building project – six buildings of 13 floors with ten apartments on each floor. It was a maze, a dangerous building with a lot of drug trafficking and violence, but I remember this feeling of passing the apartment door and being home – an apartment filled with books and records. My dad moved his 75 boxes of vinyls all by himself.

We left that building when I was a teenager, for another, safer unit next to the Conservatoire de Paris [a music conservatory] and one of the biggest concert venues for rock music, Le Zenith. As a teenager, I would spend a lot of time there, going to shows at Le Zenith and the festival Jazz à la Villette.

My mom was very good at finding free or cheap tickets to see theater shows or concerts. They never hired a babysitter. I would come with them to any event, even at a young age. I remember going to see Tibetan monks, long raga concerts, Luigio Nono, or whatever was playing at Maison de la Radio for an affordable price.

My dad listened mostly to classical and contemporary music. For a while, he was really into Pierre Henry, or Wagner. My mom liked Billie Holiday, and French singers from the 1950s, such as Georges Brassens or Boris Vian. When there was no music on, we would listen to public radio France Culture. 

In our small apartment, there wasn’t a lot of privacy, and sounds would circulate and blend. I was interested in this fact that music melts with its environment. Because I didn’t have any siblings, I had my own room and some tapes with a tape player, so I could play my own stuff; I remember for example listening to a French narration of Debussy’s Children’s Corner. I also started recording my own radio program as a kid, mimicking France Culture.

One afternoon my uncle showed up with an upright piano he wanted to lend us because he was moving. Suddenly I had a piano! 

I would mimick contemporary music or Bartók and had fun hammering the piano with my fists. I would also play when my parents would argue, as a way to escape these conflicts. My mom got me private lessons from a Polish pianist friend of hers, who was very kind, and I learned to play Satie or Chopin. I loved it.

I started music school early, at around four years old. Then I started to study celtic harp and piano at around eight. My music school teacher was very kind. One day she invited me to her gigantic, super posh apartment near Champs-Élysées for tea. I was in awe. I never saw anything that fancy in my whole life. There was a big harp in each room.

I still have my celtic harp with the original strings. I can’t get myself to change them, even though they are so old. It’s a kind of talisman to me.

I gave up playing music in my teenage years, preferring to listen to rock music and attend concerts with my friends. I would babysit the neighbours' kid after school and use the money to buy records and concert tickets. There was no age barrier for concerts in Paris, so I started going to shows when I was around 15, with my own money. It was very exciting!

When, how and why did you start writing your own music and performing it?

It took me years to allow myself to make my own music. 

I started reviewing shows as a journalist for experimental music journals such as Movement or Octopus. I also answered the main desk phone at IRCAM, worked in art galleries and bookstores, while I studied at art school Les Beaux-Arts de Paris. I was reading Dan Graham’s essays and Kim Gordon’s lyrics and seeing art school bands. I started thinking maybe I could do music too.

First I would “just” “do the voice”.

At art school, teachers would tell me I was not a musician, since I was not singing or playing guitar, but doing spoken word. [In their mind,] I was performing not as a musician, but just a woman using her voice, while the musicians were men using their knowledge and instruments.

I kind of believed that, which seems crazy to me nowadays.

Also, ambient was not a word people knew that much. There was Ocean of Sound, the book by David Toop, which influenced me a lot, but back then, most people couldn’t name a single experimental woman musician, even though they were many. 

I remember making a sound piece and playing it in the space of my art school. People would say: “It’s sleepy and blurry, there is no rhythm, no distortion! This is ambiance, music for commercials. We don’t understand what you say, and the music is too gentle!”

The fact that I would speak French was often misunderstood, and it actually still is sometimes. It is objectified as a wish to do something “sexy”, which was never my intention. French is my first language and I don’t think of it as sexual. There can be an eros, but it’s empowered, in Anne Carson’s way, not  abandoned.

I would play in projects, doing spoken word, making sound with objects and sometimes guitar, but when people would ask about my role I would say: “I am not in the band, I am just the singer on stage, you know, here are the musicians…” I felt almost sorry for myself!

When I moved to Brussels in my mid-20s, I got an apartment with an attic – a space to play and make noise. I started making noise music and remove the voice for a while to become completely genderless, not judged by my gender, using the moniker Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. I met Bartolomé [Sanson], my husband, in 2010. We started Shelter Press together a year later, which allowed me to explore and release music.

Who were some of the artists and composers that inspired you in your journey at that point – and what did you learn from them?

Björk, PJ Harvey, Cat Power, Kim Gordon or Kim Deal were crucial to me as a teenager in the 1990s, because they seemed free and bold and incredibly talented. I would listen to them all the time. They were just goddesses who would inspire me but I knew I would never become one of them. They had beautiful singing voices, which I never had.

As a young adult in Paris, I learned about other ways of making music, watching experimental musicians play live, going to shows at Les Instants Chavirés or other small venues. I remember seeing Keith Rowe or The Necks, and being amazed by the way they deal with duration, silence, anticipation. But also, weirdly enough, Animal Collective’s first show in a tiny venue, where they would just make a mess. It made me very happy because they didn’t seem as serious as the experimental musicians I would otherwise see play. They just seemed to have fun and I wanted to try that.

A record that would really inspire me was Private Parts by Robert Ashley. This is an album that feels very close to me.

It always appeared to me that your art is equal parts music and poetry. There is something in your whispered performance of the lyrics that transforms it. Were you inspired by certain poets?

As a kid I wanted to be a writer. I was a Rimbaud fan!

I was writing all the time. I would skip high school to go to a café, order one coffee in six hours, read Camus and write into my notebooks, skipping lunch and school. I lived the Parisian cliché! At the time, I didn’t have a phone or a computer. Everything was analogue. Sometimes I would transcribe my writings with a typewriter. Needless to say, I lost them all.

As a young woman, I read a lot of poetry: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, but also French avant-garde poetry such as Olivier Cadiot, Tarkos, Emmanuel Hoccquart, or even older French poets such as Yves Bonnefoy or Henri Michaux. I was involved in the school theater company and play Brecht, Tcheckhov, and so on. As a teenager, I discovered the Beat generation and found it very interesting but also kind of macho, and I disliked that part of it. 

So you are right, music to me was always connected with language.

When I talk on stage, it’s always improvised. It has to be a surprise for me as well, an experience, an opening that I share with the audience. 

As you mentioned, some of your earlier albums were released under Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, which is a Nico song title. When and why did you decide to release music under your real name?

When I turned 30, I felt my moniker couldn’t be “I am the little knight” anymore. It just didn’t make sense. I had to be myself. I was not little anymore!

I discovered your work through your collaborations with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. How did your friendship originate and what do you love about working with him?

I was a fan of his music and his label Root Strata. Very influential on me. Also the Root Blog they had – that would share so many beautiful sources.

We met when Bartolomé and I travelled to San Francisco in 2010. We became friends and organically started collaborating. I love the records we made together, it’s a real correspondence. I hope we’ll make more records! We only played live together once in Montreal and I loved it too. We had a piano, a Fender Rhodes, I think Jefre had a cassette player, it was fun!

Two of my favourite albums in your catalogue are The Flower and The Vessel (2019) and Image Langage (2022). Can you talk about their genesis?

I recorded The Flower and The Vessel mostly travelling in the Pacific Northwest while pregnant with our child. Bartolomé just bought a beautiful book from the 1950s about Ikebana, and this became an inspiration for the record. A search of simple composition through selective elements. A search of harmony between the inside and the outside. The whole album questions what is the act of creation and the flux between what’s inside and outside of you, the porosity of it.

Image Langage was recorded during Covid at two temporary residencies: one at La Becque artist residency in Switzerland and one at a relative’s house in Normandy. The record was inspired by the works of Sylvia Plath and Agnes Martin. It’s about the idea of a home when you don’t have one, how language can become a home, or a painting, and how women feel alienation because of all the tasks they have to accomplish, the fragility of the psyche in everyday life and through isolation, how they deal with inspiration through this canvas of tasks, roles they have to accomplish, but also their environment, their relationship with nature and the influence it has on their work – the English landscape for Sylvia Plath, the New Mexico desert for Agnes Martin.

I’ve been intrigued by your references to films, specifically the works of the French Nouvelle Vague. Can you elaborate on the connection to your own artistic practice and what you love about these films?

I like playing with echoes and reverbations, that idea of intertextuality – a song is about a film that was about a book… I imagine that works of art communicate amongst themselves, without their authors, a bit like ghosts or Borges’s characters. A space within a space, almost like an AI without the technology.

What interests me mostly in Nouvelle Vague is the use of the voice-over, or the thinking voice. But in most of the films, it’s men thinking in lieu of women, so in my mind I juxtaposed them with Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, or Chantal Akerman. I imagine dialogues.

The thinking voice is something that fascinates me because we don’t have access to it – it is private. It’s only through literature that we have access to it.

I just read this article in The New Yorker by Rivka Galchen about birdsong. Her daughter suggests that birds have a thinking voice we can’t hear because it’s in their head. I found this idea wonderful and very inspiring. Now I want to write an album about the inner voices of birds!

It’s a loaded question – could you talk about your spiritual journey? Do you feel drawn to any specific practices, and how do these then find their way into your music?

My relationship with spirituality is beyond language.

What I can say is that it’s present.

I like the way the choreographer Steve Paxton, Éliane Radigue or John Cage would talk about Buddhism – through simple things, stories and metaphors, evoking daily chores.

My father was interested in Buddhist and Indian philosophy, so he would read me texts and bring me along to temples or concerts. I was interested, but I also saw how people spoke about things and didn’t accomplish them in their daily lives.

For example, I feel conflicted about this [Buddhist] idea of detachment, or as Robert Ashley says, “sometimes sitting next to myself”. I think it’s attachment and care that brings out the best in you most of the time – taking care of a child is such a fantastic learning experience, on a purely human level, but spiritually as well.

So far, it’s weird to say, but my relationship with spirituality comes with a  simple way of life. 

I live in the remote countryside, in an old stone house from the 18th century, in a medieval, coastal village of 700 people, who used to be fishermen.

When I am in my garden, I connect with the spirit of my grandmother, but also the history of this piece of land, its previous inhabitants, its current inhabitants, the birds, the insects…

I am a parent, I cook everyday, I play with my kid after school; I clean my house, I garden, I iron my clothes, I do the laundry, I draw, and I do music. I walk by the sea. I worry about money; I worry about wars and global warming. I observe the animals. I don’t feel any shame about doing chores because my husband does half of it. It’s not like I have more tasks than him, we just take care of the household as a family.

I don’t go out often. I put a log in the fire. I listen to music.

I find a lot of truth while cooking soup.

When I play shows or when I am in the studio, it’s an infusion of this simple life, but connected with death, the cosmos – the big questions. Not necessarily by evoking them, but just by letting them in, as if opening a window. To me, art is part of life – I don’t separate “high” things from “low” things. My family were workers, and from them I learned to respect everyday life and its assignments. Spirituality is an invisible thread that connects all those pearls – and the missing one as well.

It appears you’ve been inspired by the night sky for your new album Space As An Instrument. What was the writing and recording process like?

The night sky for sure.

Actually, I wrote this novel that is unpublished, that I keep writing and unwriting, called Space IS An Instrument, and there is this sentence in it:

“A space that doesn’t exist in a world that exists”

or:

“a space that exists in a world that doesn’t exist”

This sentence was the beginning of the record. I carried it with me even before that, while writing and recording Image Langage.

I read this book by Olivier Remaud called Thinking Like An Iceberg about the importance of icebergs in the world and our relationship to them. I wanted to make a record with an iceberg as the main character and its relationship to the sky, but without eyes. Because we connect with the sky, the planets, the stars mostly with the sense of vision, while I think there are other ways to feel it present around us, in us.

My process is often the same: I play, I record, and slowly I organize the sounds as they appear to me. I love what Éliane Radigue says about her relationship with sounds, how they present themselves to her, and how she listens.

You could interpret “space” in the title as a word for the cosmos, or in the sense of room or dimension. Space becomes an instrument if employed deliberately though negative space, silence…

Yes, absolutely. I come from a visual arts background, so to me, music always has three dimensions, it’s literally made of “volumes”, which means it takes space.

For example, what interests me in Isamu Noguchi’s or Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures is their relationship with the void, the air, the matter of air. I see it in music too. Molecules, electricity, waves… it’s magic to me. 

Negative space, silence, to me is something that I often feel as a gentle, positive force, overwhelming in a good way. Again, I open my window to it when I play.

Did you find any specific inspirations in film, music, art or literature for this new album?

Besides Thinking Like An Iceberg, I read another book about ice, called Do Glaciers Listen? by Julie Cruikshank. Ice suddenly became this perfect metaphor for negative space and what I was addressing in this record.

We need ice so much, it is our memory and our future. Ice appears on other planets as well. It’s a language we have difficulty understanding; it’s an archive of things we don’t get.

This whole record is a kind of prayer for the ice elements of our planet.

Then I connected ice with writing.

Writing as possible recordings we lost. Lost music.

I was reading those journals of female Japanese writers from the middle age: As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan, and I was struck by the musicality of it.

I also re-read the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Anna Akhmatova and it inspired my song “Should I Return To You”. Her relationship to loss is very interesting. Loss is like the opposite of capitalism. Half of the earth, maybe more than half, is full of people who are dispossessed and keep losing their land, people, knowledge – and the other half keeps wanting more, it’s insane. I think music has always been connected with loss, like lullabies that help losing your awareness to dive into sleep.

I love answering with delays of centuries to an old writing. I hope someone will do that with my work in a few centuries!

The piano works as a character on the record. It is the “spaceship” to travel through each track, or quest. It’s a shape-shifting piano – sometimes it’s a Steinway, sometimes an upright, sometimes a digital one. But it’s a thinking subject, it is the iceberg. It’s questioning what’s a melody, what’s an instrument, the piece of wood it’s made of. It’s the narrator, the voice-over.

You have been co-running Shelter Press for years, releasing your own albums and those of other artists as well. Is running an indie label a viable career option, or is it mainly just about retaining your rights and control over the presentation of your art?

It is this of course, but it’s more than that. 

When we created Shelter Press, it was really the necessity of having our own structure to be able to do things. Who would do it, if not us?

Now Bartolomé works full-time with the label, it’s his day job, i just co-curate. So it’s also an old publishing house model, because we work at home. It’s a mom and pop’s business, but without a storefront, just online and now with great distribution networks and sometimes PR help. No interns, no employees. We don’t own the masters we release, so it’s also a question of circular energy. We are pretty close to the artists. Most of them we’ve known for years.

I am 43, so I’m not a young musician anymore. Because of family duties, it’s not easy for me to tour. I don’t like putting selfies up on Instagram. I feel pretty private about my life. I don’t live in a city. It’s hard to make a sustainable living as a middle-aged woman experimental musician with a mortgage and a kiddo. So you have to be realistic. Do things simply, again – and trust that there is an audience that supports what you do. Which I feel very grateful for everyday. The audience is intertwined with the career of an artist; it’s a relationship, whether you want it or not.

I feel it during the shows, especially in the silent moments when the room holds this silence with me. It’s precious.