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The Flower And The Vessel

The Flower And The Vessel

by Félicia Atkinson on Shelter Press.

The album’s 11 songs span a vast pantheon of whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences on this particular collection: Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (“a scary opera for kids”), Debussy’s “La Mer” (for its union of narration and music) and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” (as an exercise in negative space, irony without cynicism, and “melody with doubt”). There’s certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks, however veiled, abstracted, or unorthodox. Melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia.