Felicia Atkinson will release a new album, Image Language.

Atkinson recorded Image Language at Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy. Recognizing the normalization of home studios, she revisited the work of 20th-century women artists who chose 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,” she says, “a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life.”

The album is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, and instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” There are also monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration.

Conceptually, Image Language is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. “It is about getting lost in places imagined and real,” the label, Shelter Press, says. “It registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites.”

Atkinson lives on the wild coast of Normany and has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. In 2020, she put out Echo on Boomkat Editions. More recently, she put out Un hiver en plein, a collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, on Shelter Press.

Tracklisting

01. La Brume
02. The Lake Is Speaking
03. The House That Agnes Built
04. Our Tides
05. Image Language
06. Les Dunes
07. Becoming a Stone
08. Pieces of Sylvia
09. The World is Full of Abandoned Meanings

Image Language LP is scheduled for June 24 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Becoming a Stone” in full via the player below and pre-order here.