Kiezsalon w/ Ectoplasm Girls and Félicia Atkinson at Musikbrauerei / Wednesday, 27.09.2017

Our first Kiezsalon after a long summer break will take form as a double-bill featuring the Ectoplasm Girls and Felicia Atkinson. Each in their own way, both acts expand the sonic vocabulary of the words optimism, doubt, blankness and sheer horror.

Ectoplasm Girls is a project initiated in 2007 by sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne, with the intention of expressing their fascination with death and dreams, manifesting these subjects through sound and video.

With the release of last year’s “New Feeling Come” LP on Joachim Nordwall’s iDEAL imprint, they finally managed to shake off their (possibly unjust) association with the witch house hype of some time ago and have recorded 15 stages of séance-like ambience with an incorporeal presence belied only by their clammy sleight of hand and vaporous traces of breathing. Nevertheless, they remain at home in the realm of audio-visual live performance.

Félicia Atkinson is a French composer and visual artist. After recording serveral records under the Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier moniker, she has been releasing music under her own name since 2013. Having moved to the French Alps for two years she recorded her highly acclaimed album “A Readymade Ceremony” and the material for her collaborative album with NY-based musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

With those two albums, she reached a milestone in her musical research, defining the seminal elements of her composition tools: concrete music, asmr voices, minimal electronics, field recordings, improvisation with guitar and piano, abstract distortions and infra basses, always held by a strong sense of musical harmony. Her latest release, “Hand in Hand”, is easily her most ambitious to date. It sees Atkinson foreground her voice, whilst limiting other instrumental elements to an almost austere minimu. This apparent emptyness – somewhat reminiscent of dub music – grants the space for her lyrical experiments to assume a rare presence and materiality.