(Home Normal,2011)
'O-Re-Gon' captures the sounds of one rainy day with Felicia Atkinson at Adam Selzer's Type Foundry studio in Portland during the summer of 2010. She'd recently returned from a coast-to-coast trip and was recovering from a Lyme disease when Selzer introduced her to a menagerie of instruments she'd never played before: a fender rhodes, a marimba, and a harmonium. Together with her better acquainted golden electric guitar and a piano, she improvised these two long, mesmerizing and repetitive tracks. They both feel drowsy and road weary in a hypnagogic manner, the first revolving limply struck harmonium and ghostly vocal utterances (actually the lyrics from a poem by Victor Hugo) around a lone guitar shimmer, gradually descending into chilly, desolate and exhausted loops. The second is is like the fever dream after the collapse, all woozy drones and hushed French vocals with metallic glimmers of marimba leading into a dense spectral drift of rhodes and harmonium as a sort of elegy for David Lynch's 'Laura Palmer'. Quietly troubled and eerie stuff.
Félicia Atkinson / Green and Grey / O-RE-GON from félicia atkinson on Vimeo.
The album was made on one rainy day in July 2010, when Félicia had already been traveling for 2 months coast to coast in the United States. She was just recovering from a Lyme disease she caught a week before in upstate New York in the deep woods. The sound engineer Adam Selzer showed Félicia all the instruments she could use, most of them she never played before: a fender rhodes, a marimba, and a harmonium, but also some she had used before: a (this time) golden electric guitar and a piano: this is how this day of musical wonder began.Félicia didn’t have any idea what she wanted to play, she had not touched an instrument for two months and wanted the tracks to be completely improvised. So they captured one track in the morning, Grey & Green, and one track in the afternoon: Green & Grey.
The music was influenced by this special state of body and mind she was in, just in the middle of being sick and, beside this event, in the middle of a wonderful 4 month trip, and the many “ghosts” that appeared during this improvising session. The record is also a kind of elegy to some dark and beautiful destinies that ended in troubled water: Victor Hugo’s daughter Leopoldine (the lyrics of Green & Grey are a drift from one of his poems), of David Lynch’s ‘Laura Palmer’ and Robert Bresson’s ‘Mouchette’.
