INNER_SPACES spring edition of 2023 ends with an evening with two musicians from Shelter Press, an independent publishing house, founded in 2012 with the aim of publishing art books, literary texts and experimental electronic music records.
In the first part Thomas Ankersmit, with a project dedicated to the fifty years of the Serge modular synthesizer, the main instrument of the Dutch musician’s career for two decades. His music, released on the Shelter Press, PAN and Touch labels, combines intricate sonic detail and raw electrical power, delivering a highly physical and spatially articulated sound experience. Acoustic phenomena such as infrasound and otoacoustic emissions (sounds that come from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) occupy a leading role in his practice.
The perspective of Félicia Atkinson is quite different, a multidisciplinary artist between the world of sounds and visual installations, co-founder of the Shelter Press label. Pioneer of a new form of expression in electronic music with a layered genre that brings together electronic keyboards (Fender Rhodes piano), acoustic instruments (piano), digital media, voice, poetry, whispers, wisps of atmospheric noise in a flow that reinvents perception daily. In his works the coordinates of a world inhabited by stratified voices are sketched in tales at various levels of abstract stories that alternately stretch and bend time and space, of which the artist can be the narrator without necessarily being the protagonist. Much of Félicia Atkinson’s music revolves around slow, deliberate passages of spoken text recorded at extremely close range, where the tone of her voice is caught in a state between urgency and detachment. Curiously, listening to the French artist’s music one is not disoriented, on the contrary, one perceives familiar features, however recomposed in a new way, the slow and inexorable flow constitutes a continuum which leaves the listener with a sure footing to follow the long listening itinerary that in the end leaves a taste of reconciliation. Perhaps it is in this sense that a conviction of the musician summed up in this lapidary sentence should be interpreted: “music is about mystery and reconciliation”.