Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou – Reflections Vol.3: Water Poems
On Water Poems, Atkinson and Vantzou channel their own oceanside dwellings into ambient sounds tinged with nostalgia, joy and hidden depths
The lapping water that burnishes the edges of this collaboration between multidisciplinary artists Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou – friends for over 15 years, kindred spirits for eternity possibly – holds the multitudes of humanity’s draw to the sea. These Water Poems sit in a lineage with the trireme of Ancient Greece, sickly Victorians at the coast for healing, writers beckoned to Tangier, and point-and-shoot film photos in a box in your family home, sunbleached and filled with bright swimsuits. Atkinson and Vantzou channel their own oceanside dwellings into ambient sounds tinged with nostalgia, joy and hidden depths.
It manifests in compositions that subvert the usual calm of water-based field recordings. The repeated piano chords and chanted mantras of You are Porous evoke the majesty and terribleness of endless water. Elsewhere on Film Still / The Sea, the ASMR quality of the duo’s voices, often whispered so quietly as to render them unintelligible, slowly turns from soothing to sinister, while electroacoustic textures create backdrops that constantly morph in shape just as foaming sea drifts around a rockpool. Closer Scorpio Purple Skies, a near ten-minute drone glistening with the lap steel of John Also Bennett, gestures to something more elemental and cosmic, the mythic and the earthly folding in on themselves.
Listen to: Film Still / The Sea, Shines for Eternity, Scorpio Purple Skies