Felicia Atkinson begins US tour in NYC tonight (stream her 2017 LP)

French experimental/ambient musician Félicia Atkinson has announced a short US tour that begins TONIGHT (3/30) with her first of two NYC shows. Tonight’s is at The Emily Harvey Foundation (537 Broadway #2). Tonight’s show was organized by Rachel Valinsky, and here are the details:

While I was also listening to… NY presents performances by Morgan Bassichis, Constance DeJong, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Sara Magenheimer that tackle the genre of the “talk” and the medium of “talking” as occasions for investigations in narrativity and storytelling, the relationship between sound and language, and improvisatory modalities of speech.

The evening features a musical and poetic outro by Félicia Atkinson and a silent performance by Yann Sérandour.

Félicia will be performing “Words and stones with xylophone,” which is “a piece for poetry, concrete sounds and monotonous resonances conceived as three concentric circles.” More info here.

Félicia then plays Issue Project Room on Saturday (3/31), where she’ll be “presenting a brand new performance involving an imaginary dialogue between the poems of Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and texts of her own, in French and in English, accompanied by electronics, voice and piano.” The show also features Afrikan Sciences & Sassacyprigo. More info and tickets here. All of her dates are listed below.

Félicia’s latest album is 2017’s Hand In Hand, which is considered an “expanded development” of the compositions she began on 2015’s A Readymade Ceremony, and it also follows her 2016 collaborative album with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. She cites experimental composers Joan La Barbara, Robert Ashley or Delia Derbyshire as influences for the album, and for this album, she “used different sources for the lyrics and scores of her tracks: house plant instruction books, Desert Magazine old issues, architecture manuals, JG Ballard and [Philip] K. Dick’s books, as well as her own poetry.” The album has moments that recall Holly Herndon’s ASMR-meets-Laurie Anderson approach, moments of crackly ambience and Musique concrète, and some creepy, out-there, bad acid trip moments too. It’s a strange, captivating listen, and if you haven’t heard the album yet, you can check it out below.

Félicia Atkinson — 2018 US Tour Dates
03.30.18 – New York, NY – The Emily Harvey Foundation
03.31.18 – Brooklyn, NY – Issue Project Room
04.05.18 – Chicago, IL – The Owl
04.15.18 – Portland, OR – Reed College
04.18.18 – Seattle, WA – Rare Air at the Timbre Room