Image Language

2022 release. Felicia Atkinson's music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record-Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy-the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens-or is it offers, kindly, even promises?-to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O'Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with it's own function in the project of everyday life.