Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou
Felicia Atkinson is a French avant garde music composer who has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. She has collaborated with musicians including Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Chris Watson, Christina Vantzou, and Stephen O’Malley, and with ensembles including Eklekto (Geneva) and Neon (Oslo). She has performed at venues and festivals including INA GRM/Maison de la Radio and the Philharmonie (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), the Barbican Center (London), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Atonal (Berlin), Henie Onstad (Oslo), Unsound (Krakow), and Skanu Mesz (Riga). For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The french electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, midi instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both french and english.
Christina Vantzou is a Greek-American composer based between Brussels and Athens. She pays close attention to psychoacoustics, affects, and the invisible sensations generated by sound. In her solo and collaborative works, she deals with suspended states and slow orchestral shifts while weaving in an intimate practice of documenting her wanderings through field recording. In performances, listeners enter into a shared space where sound moves and morphs like the weather, and this deployment of the invisible allows audiences to travel to the depths with a light touch. Vantzou has presented her work in spaces such as Villa Medici (Rome), Philharmonie de Paris, Barbican Center (London), BOZAR (Bruxelles), Kölner Philharmonie (Cologne), Villa Lontana (Rome), Cafe Oto (London), St. Anne and the holy trinity in Brooklyn (NYC), and the Conservatory of Athens.
Photo by John Bennett