Pre-order of Space As An Instrument. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
releases October 25, 2024
€8EUR or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
- Bandcamp exclusive / gold vinyl (300 units)
- Gatefold sleeve with OBI
- digital download included
Includes digital pre-order of Space As An Instrument.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
shipping out on or around October 25, 2024
edition of 300
Purchasable with gift card
€25EURor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
- black vinyl (1200 units)
- Gatefold sleeve with OBI
- digital download included
Includes digital pre-order of Space As An Instrument.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
shipping out on or around October 25, 2024
edition of 1200
Purchasable with gift card
€25EURor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
- CD
- 6 panels digisleeve w/ obi
Includes digital pre-order of Space As An Instrument.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
shipping out on or around October 25, 2024
edition of 1000
Purchasable with gift card
€16EURor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
SPACE AS AN INSTRUMENT Bundle, incl.
— Limited gold LP (Bandcamp Exclusive)
— Desert Dust TSHIRT
— Old Stone CAP (privé)
Includes digital pre-order of Space As An Instrument.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
shipping out on or around October 25, 2024
Purchasable with gift card
€60EURor more
Hat
- Low profil dad cap
- 100% cotton - old stone
- Embroidered logo
shipping out on or around October 25, 2024
5 remaining
Purchasable with gift card
€25EURor more
Shirt
- high quality unisex t-shirt
- combed ring-spun organic cotton
- size M/L/XL available. design works well if wear oversized.
- drawing by Félicia Atkinson / limited edition
One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space as an instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable.
We are guided through Space as an instrument by the piano, its alinear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space as an instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on “Sorry,” arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on “Pensées Magiques.” These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson’s music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, “but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow.”
Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and miniscule, distant and immediate.
This phenomena is central to “Thinking Iceberg,” a 13-minute piece that was whittled down from an hour and a half performance, who remain only a ghostly presence on the album’s recording. Atkinson wrote the piece in response to Olivier Remaud’s book ‘Thinking Like An Iceberg,’ in which the philosopher assigns agency to these massive, endangered objects and imagines how they might perceive their millenia-long relationship to humans. Stoic synthesizer tones percolate while water flows just out of the immediate frame with a disarming clarity and presence. As the piece crests, Atkinson’s whispered voice emerges softly, placed right against the listener’s left ear, contrasting with the billowing mass of sound that otherwise dominates. We emerge with a glimmer of awareness of how immensity and delicacy can coexist as time and humanity extract their toll.
Atkinson says her music exists “on the verge of understanding and not understanding,” which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener’s perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.
credits
releases October 25, 2024
Composed and recorded by Félicia Atkinson
Painting by Harold Ancart
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu
supported by 40 fans who also own “Space As An Instrument”
“There is a quality I would use to describe something going on in the music of Kali Malone. In Living Torch, I feel what I would call “the isness of what is happening,” breaching denial, inciting acknowledgement & caring, in the midst of devastation, & holding it still.”
My full review essay at https://eliotcardinaux.wordpress.com/2024/06/05/kali-malone-living-torch/ eliotcardinaux
supported by 33 fans who also own “Space As An Instrument”
what can I even say about this that I haven't already said about other claire albums. it's the first one I heard and also probably my favourite of hers katsumashi
A collaboration between Devon Welsh of Majical Cloudz and Matthew E. Duffy, Belave is eerie, unsettling music that feels like a dark secret. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 22, 2017
supported by 27 fans who also own “Space As An Instrument”
I was just listening to this album and painting on Aseprite some logo for a project, and it really took a spin for the better. Thanks Malone, O'Malley & Railton :)
Esko Tarkka