Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou - Film Still / The Sea
In the eight years since Belgian composer Christina Vantzou released her stunning album, No.4, I've not knowingly listened to anything else from her catalogue. Not a deliberate evasion, sometimes that's just the way of things. I truly love that record, I've spent hours and days and weeks inside its strange and gentle world: half-asleep on foreign trains, late-night sounds inside familiar rooms.
Crafted with a small ensemble that includes harp, cello, piano, vibraphone, and a scattering of other instruments, it's one of the most beautiful instrumental albums I've ever heard. I stumbled upon it, the circumstances long forgotten now, stepped inside of it, and never felt the need to reach any further than that. Sometimes that's just the way of things too.
I noticed Christina today, nestled in my inbox alongside a variety of other names and sounds and ideas, and I followed it here, to a new chapter. The song, and accompany video, is called 'Film Still / The Sea' and it's taken from Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, a forthcoming new collaboration between Vantzou and the French musician and artist Félicia Atkinson.
Intimate and conversational, the album explores ideas of our relationship between the shoreline the sea, the whole project growing over time from unadorned field recordings to the more fully-formed soundscapes that make-up the album as a whole. “The sea was not taken as a monolithic postcard,” Atkinson says in the album's press release, “but more a person, per se; an energy, a mystery, a complex character we face everyday, as human beings living by the sea.”
Maybe it's the unexpected sunshine I found here this morning, maybe its the presence of water I've been noticing so much lately, but everything here felt immediately captivating; the rolling piano, the birdsong, the oddly-shaped and whispered voices that drift in and out of focus, like the waves held in the film that partner these sounds.
On Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou channel their friendship and atmospheric artistry into ceremonial focus. Spoken-word environments and orchestral imagination flow like tributaries into a unified stream, resulting in a collection of dreamlike songs and soundscapes anchored in sea, sky and stone. Through electro-acoustic instrumentation, voice, and environmental sound, Water Poems invites listeners into a subconscious space somewhere between everyday intimacy and the oceanic enigma from which all life unfolds.
'Film Still / The Sea' is the first taste of the album, which is set to be released on April 10th, via the RVNG Intl. label. Check out the film, shot on Super 8 film by Director Natasha Giannaraki, below.
