Christina Vantzou and Félicia Atkinson’s new collaboration is a breathtakingly beautiful world of hushed, swooning sonics and suggestive spoken word. Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems drifts, but its drift has a discernible underlying purpose. It all moves inexorably – you might say tidally – towards its brooding, melancholic final track, Scorpio Purple Skies, stretching out time and filling space in strange and alluring ways.
Scorpio Purple Skies has a filmic quality: the landscape it describes is an impressive but harsh expanse, and the musical terms it uses – at least in the beginning – are fittingly Morricone-esque. As the piece progresses, however, the mood seems to shift. Drawn-out synth notes act as anchors. We begin to notice the juxtaposition of desert-like dryness and the soft shifting of oceans. This tension invites a deep human reflection on – and connection with – the natural world. The closeness of the spoken parts is spine-tingling, drawing us further into this very specific sonic space.
This is the endpoint, but how we get there is just as important. Atkinson and Vantzou are both experienced composers and songwriters with a wealth of excellent material behind them, so they know exactly how to construct an album with a distinct narrative flow in mind. The cinematic ideas are introduced in the opening track, Film Still / The Sea, whose title tells you much of what to expect from the album. Soft keys, crackles of found sound (recorded by Vantzou at the site of the Delphic Oracle), Atkinson’s whispers on the edge of the audible, bird calls: each of these things have their meaning, symbolically or literally, but when pieced together they become greater than the sum of their parts. They create a kind of lucid dream, a world that seems to be malleable, and that malleability comes with the minimum of effort or outside interference. The duo describe personal moments but present them as shared worlds, as if exploded by magnification.
The descriptiveness is present in the breath that surrounds the words, as much as in the words themselves. Both artists’ voices are present, and the words are in Atkinson’s native French as well as English. When the duo’s soft whispers move around each other, flitting and curling, the lyrics don’t seem to matter as much as the mood. Such is the case on A Secret, which susurrates with mystery and meaning over a ripe synth drone. Atkinson’s voice is to the fore on With / You / Movement / Creatures, where the underlying musical current of synths, vibraphone and gong seems drawn from the same stream as some of the most effective Japanese environmental music of the 1980s. That Vantzou is well-versed in the history of ambient music is unsurprising: she formed one half of the acclaimed duo The Dead Texan, along with Adam Wiltzie, most famous as a member of ambient pioneers Stars of the Lid.
The ambience continues throughout, albeit in a constantly shifting form. Little Piano Rivers is a delightful cascade of treated keys. The piano on Shines For Eternity is restrained and minimalistic – almost neo-classical – but the attendant gurgles and buzzes are strange, evoking bodily processes as much as external natural ones. Amour, A Liquid State is fraught with dramatic synths that sound like a nod to the soundtracks of sci-fi films, or are perhaps a warning about the fragile state of the Earth’s watery ecosystems. The closeness of the crackles, chimes, keys and voice on You Are Porus makes for an all-encompassing listen, treading the fine line between the lush and pillowy and the weird and discomforting. The world is so complete that even a siren that interjects itself half-way through the song is made to seem almost laughably temporary.
It’s easy to get lost when writing about this sort of music, just as it’s easy for the casual listener to get lost while listening to it: the temptation is to write a review that is as gushing and as nebulous as the album itself. But in some ways, that is doing it an injustice. The amount of work and the amount of talent, the close listening and the close collaboration which went into the making of Water Poems, must have been immense. Its every moment rings with care, craft and – for all its liquid, free-form appearances – an impressive sonic exactitude. An utterly compelling musical journey.
Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems (April 10th, 2026) RVNG Intl.
Pre-Order: https://lnk.to/rvngnl120
