- Cryptic ambient explorations.
- As artists who have worked in ambient music for years, Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma are a natural duo. Cantu-Ledesma has amassed an extensive back catalog of drone and ambient projects as a solo artist and in collaboration with others such as Liz Harris, AKA Grouper, and Alexis Georgopoulos, AKA Arp. Atkinson runs the multimedia label Shelter Press with Bartolomé Sanson. Like Cantu-Ledesma, she is prolific and versatile, as prone to mimicking American desert landscapes (2018's Coyotes) as she is to reference 1940s French literature, as on her 2015 album A Readymade Ceremony. In both artists' catalogues, there's a constant reconciliation of the familiar and the ambiguous, a theme that surfaces again on their second collaborative album.
Describing the creative process behind Limpid As The Solitudes, Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma toss out far-reaching cultural reference points. The album, they say, draws from Sylvia Plath, André Breton and '90s films such as Trust and Chungking Express that channel "ultra-modern solitude." These seemingly disparate ideas feed into an album that makes the familiar fundamentally mysterious. The album's use of environmental noise points to a similar idea. By using sounds the listener already knows, Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma invite them to situate themselves within the music. At the same time, the artists manipulate those familiar, environmental sounds into something altogether strange.
The album's sense of familiarity comes from the clarity of the field recordings on tracks like "And The Flower Have Time For Me," where creaky door hinges and birdsong surface over a single protracted tone. The closer, "All Night I Carpenter," feels like a summation of the first three tracks, fusing sound poetry and electronic modulation into field recordings that call back to earlier moments. An icy bell, which sounds like a carpenter hitting a nail, recurs in a series of different forms throughout. And the piano line around the five-minute mark is among the album's most conventionally beautiful moments. But full as Limpid As The Solitudes is with recognizable sounds, it remains ultimately unknowable. Like the films that inspired it, the album seems to pose unanswerable questions. It's music that's as inviting as it is challenging—easy to love, but difficult to parse.
Tracklist01. And The Flower Have Time For Me
02. Her Eyelids Say
03. Indefatigable Purple
04. All Night I Carpenter